First Surgery Recovery Day 13: Rubber bands, snow and a free movie

I'm healing more and more every day, though last night was a bit rough. I have five rubber bands connecting my upper and lower jaws for the purpose of moving my lower jaw slightly back to the center. The muscle memory is telling it to go back near where it used to be, so the rubber bands slowly fix that over the course of a few weeks. I undid one side of each rubber band last night to brush behind my teeth and found that trying to open my jaw hurt a lot. I took about 15 minutes to put the rubber bands back on. It's not easy, though my surgeon did give me a pretty nifty tool that he said he and others helped design during his time at an Atlanta gathering of oral surgeons.

I popped an Ibuprofen and tried to get some sleep. The first 2-4 hours have been the hardest every night. I always end up waking and coughing, and have to rinse a few times. For some reason, 12-4am is difficult, but I can sleep very easily from 4 until around 8-9am. I suppose that's my body saying "ok, enough, I need sleep."

A heavy snow started falling earlier this morning here in Brooklyn. Watching it out the window now, I recall hearing something about 6-10 inches falling today. I hope the electricity stays on. I haven't had many electrical problems with this apartment over the last three years, so it should be ok.

I've been working from home since last Monday. I feel fortunate that the tasks my job requires can almost all be done on a computer. The only weekdays I didn't work were January 8-10 when I was in surgery and in the hospital. I am not able to do a lot of work since I'm constantly getting up to eat, cleaning my nose and tending to other things, but I'm doing a few things that hopefully help my co-workers. Speaking of snow and my workplace, they closed at 12:30pm so everyone could get home on time. We're all working from home the rest of the day. I plan on returning to work next Monday the 27th.

Later in the evening, my girlfriend and I found a free rental promo code for Target Direct on Xbox 360. We watched Blue Jasmine. It was ok. As for video games I've been playing during recovery, I finished Episode 1 for The Wolf Among Us, and today I bought Syberia and Hitman: Absolution for about $7-8 total on Steam. I plan on trying to watch a documentary sometime tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

Now it's time for bed. I feel probably a 2/10 pain in the left jaw from the rubber bands doing their thing. It's not bad. I popped an Ibuprofen at around 9pm.  Tomorrow at 4pm, it will mark two full weeks since the end of my surgery. I made it.