11 months after jaw surgery, looking at old photos really makes me feel how much has changed!

Hello! I’m a patient who had double jaw surgery with Director Shin Hye-jin at Iu Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery haha. It still feels amazing that it has already been 11 months since my surgery. Right after surgery, each day felt so long, but looking back, I’m already approaching one year. At first I wondered when recovery would ever end, but now that I think about it, time really has passed so quickly. These days, I hardly think about the surgery at all in daily life. There are many days when I go by without even being conscious that I had surgery, and even my family seems to have naturally gotten used to it to the point that they sometimes forget I had it haha. A little while ago, while organizing old photos, I looked at my pre-surgery pictures again for the first time in a while. When I look in the mirror every day, I don’t really notice big changes, but when I compared my old face with my current one, I really felt how much my face had changed. Before, when I looked at my face, the parts that bothered me would stand out first, but now my overall appearance feels much more comfortable, and that alone makes me feel oddly happy. My orthodontic treatment still isn’t completely finished, so I’m continuing to visit the dentist regularly. After the appliances are tightened, I do have a few uncomfortable days. Still, rather than worrying about the discomfort itself like before, I think of it as part of the process of my bite gradually coming into alignment, so I’m able to tolerate it and keep going. Seeing the orthodontic progress in real life has also made me want to finish everything well until the end even more. I’m also amazed every time people around me say I look different than before. In particular, I used to often hear that I looked older than my age, but these days I sometimes hear that I look younger instead, so it still feels a little awkward, but I’m really happy haha. Before surgery, I worried a lot about whether I really should go through with it, but now that I think about it, it seems I’m living very satisfied, to the point that those worries feel unnecessary. More than anything, I think the biggest change is that as time passed I naturally got used to my own appearance, and I no longer consciously notice the parts that used to bother me. There really isn’t much time left until the one-year mark! I hope I can finish my orthodontic treatment well by then, and once the remaining swelling is gone, I’m excited to see what I’ll look like. I hope I can write a review at one year saying I feel even more comfortable and natural than I do now haha.