It's nearly four thirty and my tooth's hur...oh wait.

It is day 6 of my recovery from corrective jaw surgery. Thus far I have had my fair share of highs and lows. In some ways, I enjoy having time off work concentrating on recovery. This really limits the amount of things you can and can’t do. I now get made a lot of cups of tea; my meals are prepared for me; I’m not allowed to over-exert myself doing things like taking the dog for a walk or doing any housework/tidying up. To compliment this, here is a list of things that it has now become perfectly 

acceptable to do...

1.       Stay in my pyjamas, all day.

2.       Sleep more than 12 hours per day.

3.       Watch wall to wall TV

4.       Ask people to get your dinner for you.

5.       Ask people to pass you things that are not within reach or require getting up to get i.e tv remote, magazines, laptop charger, cup of tea, salt etc.

I have also come to enjoy keeping abreast of current affairs. I hear the news at least three times a day and I’m on twitter all the time. When you have all the hours of the day to google everyone’s names, politics seems a much easier subject to stay on top of. The nice thing about this is that it can make you feel connected to the world going on around you. When you’re at home with no one but the dog to talk to for most of the day, it does make you feel like the whole world is just carrying on without you. 

So, the above highlights the positives to being in a state of recovery. Now to the low points. One of the characteristic lows of the following two weeks to corrective jaw surgery is that you’re bound to come out the other side initially with a face swollen to the ‘size of a football’-as the ENT consultant nicely put it. I very luckily skipped the football phase, am passed resembling a Nick Park plasticine creation and have moved onto a Geoffrey Palmer state of affairs.

My face is also incredibly sensitive and tender and sleeping is quite difficult. I can’t eat anything that is remotely chewable so I’m eating soup, porridge and scrambled egg. This is generally fine but yesterday I chose to watch the food channels. I don’t know why, I knew it would be torture.  I predictably became quite bitter watching Nigella Lawson tottering around throwing dinner parties and Nigel Slater going through the his fridge, cooking leftover meals. I’ve have had to leave the cooking channels to their own devices for a couple of days. After a summer of eating deep fried and battered foods in abundance at Edinburgh Fringe, I see the next couple of weeks as a kind of controlled diet which it will be impossible to break without risk of screwing up my jaw forever!