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Hi all. I had upper jaw surgery (lefort 1) about 9 years ago to treat an anterior open bite and many TMD symptoms that had initially led me to making appointments with different specialists to try to get to the bottom of what’s causing them. When I bit down, only my back molars touched. When I was stressed I would clench frequently, and over night. It was hard not to clench because of the way my bite was. I initially wore a custom night guard to help stabilize my bite/jaw, which helped at first, and then proceeded with orthodontics. At the time I was hesitant to consider surgery and had been researching alternative approaches in orthodontics, like TADs. I really didn’t want to have surgery, and I do have anxiety related to thinking ‘did the doctors suggest the surgery because they thought it was the best option? were they just not trained in the newer approaches in orthodontics which could have potentially fixed my issue?’ Do you think my bite looks like an ortho-only case given what we know now, 9 years later? My ortho thought that surgery would be the best option given all the variables, and at the time that was what I decided to do. If the other alternative treatments failed, I thought all that effort would have been wasted and that I should have just had the surgery.
Fortunately the surgery went well except for an infection 1 year post op
In addition to the TMD issues I had very loud tinnitus, muffled hearing, eustachian tube dysfunction making me have frequent ear infections (among other symptoms), jaw would deviate on opening, constant popping and could easily lock closed. I did mouth breathe and also have issues breathing from my nose and sleeping soundly. Many of these issues improved as a result of the surgery which is great. I’m not sure if they would have improved otherwise or not.
Looking forward to hearing input on this case. I feel like many of my questions weren’t answered throughout this journey so I am looking for a bit of closure.
And some photos: Right before surgery vs today
Thank you!
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