Slowly recovering...

It's Saturday, four days after I got surgery, and I'm slowly feeling better. There's still some swelling which doesn't seem to be going away, or going away that fast, but I think I'll be okay until my appointment on Monday and if anything's weird they can check it out.

Here's how I looked yesterday in the morning. The bruising is MUCH BETTER but the swelling makes my cheeks and jaw look all weird.

The thing about the bruising that surprised me most was that my eyelids got red. The way the doctor and nurses described it, I thought the bruising would be mostly underneath the eye and on my cheeks. But it's kind of all around my eye. Which makes it harder to conceal.

Taking a selfie for posterity...No matter how awful it looks.

Last night after I took a shower the swelling seemed to have abated somewhat.

This counts as an improvement.

 The swelling seems to come and go...it gets worse if I lie down for a while and better if I'm standing up. But my face is gradually returning to its normal form.

Another plus is that my eyes are opening again! Due to the bruising my eyes got really small and squinty. I could always see okay, but when the bruising started to go down I looked in the mirror and went, "Hey! My eyes got big again!" It's like I didn't think about how bad it was until it started to look better.

I think I look kind of like a movie villain with really close-set narrow red eyes. :P And a distorted face with a huge chin and jaw. And sometimes all of my face covered up because I'm wearing a mask and sunglasses. Now I feel a lot of sympathy for movie villains because they have to look weird all the time and not just after surgery.

So far my nose looks about the same. There's still swelling in the tip, but it probably won't really go down until the splint comes off. The doctor warned me that the tip of the nose gets HUGE and takes the longest to get back to normal. I was actually afraid that it would get really red, but thankfully it didn't. Actually, I don't even notice the tip so much because the splint and the bruising look so much weirder. Maybe when the splint comes off I'll be like, "OMG my nose swelled up!!!!" But even it that's the case I really want to get the splint off....

The first two days after surgery, I couldn't breath through my nose at all because it was so full of blood and scabs. When I fell asleep, I would wake up with a dry mouth and throat because I was breathing only through my mouth. It felt like my nose was full of rocks that were growing out of the inside of my nostrils. You want to just rip them out, but you know that until they get loose on their own you're just going to bleed a ton and form MORE scabs. And maybe get infected too.

Every day I can breathe a little more. (Some of the scabs did get ripped out but I'm really trying not to worry at it.) It's a big relief, along with my eyes opening up and my face getting back its normal contour.

There are stitches under my nose and under my chin, and the nose ones bother me the most because they stretch tight every time I smile or laugh and it hurts. I also imagine them getting buried in the skin...

I won't really know how my nose has changed until they take off the splint. Supposedly it's going to look a bit different but of course it's hard to tell at this stage. I've noticed a few things...Like if I feel the splint it seems like it wouldn't fit over my old nose. There's no room for the bump. Also when I was drinking a soda, it felt like I didn't have to account for my nose as much I used too. My nose still sticks out over my chin, but they seem to line up more than they used too. (Both of them are still really swollen, but hopefully they'll deflate together.)

A few nights ago I was watching Clueless and a few of the girls at the school have had nose surgery. I just wanted to point and laugh like, "Ha! Where is your bruising? Where's the dried blood? Why isn't your face a distorted mess with swollen shut eyes? You obviously didn't have any surgery on your face! You just a a tiny strip of tape stuck on your nose right before filming!" Clueless does not accurately portray the after effects of surgery. In case anyone was wondering.

Two more days! I can make it...Then I get to take this itchy, uncomfortable splint OFF my face and actually wash like a normal person.

Note: Tomorrow is Mothers' Day. My grandma is coming over for lunch and obviously we're going to take some pictures. I'm wondering whether to put on a mask or just bear the splint proudly. Either way, photos that should by all accounts end up in the albums for years to come are probably going to end up looking pretty weird. Instead of going "Awww how sweet! Three generations of women," relatives are going to be all, "Did someone slug Stephanie in the nose that weekend or what?"