I had surgery at Seoul National University Hospital in 2018. It wasn’t a severe condition that affected my health, but I had a protruding lower jaw aesthetically, so I decided to have surgery.
Surgery review: I still remember the galbitang I ate for lunch on the day I was admitted... Once you have surgery, you can’t really eat regular food or meat for almost 2 months, so eat something good. After admission, writing the death consent form in the evening felt a bit chilling. The surgery was done under general anesthesia, and they said it was anesthesia that also relaxes the muscles? so I couldn’t move at all lol. During the week or so I was hospitalized after surgery, there were 3 moments that hurt the most: when they took the CT scan, when they removed the tube draining blood from the roof of my mouth. I can’t remember the other one.
Discharge review: Honestly, the pain of not being able to eat was the worst. For 3 weeks after discharge, I only ate porridge and soup, and it seriously drives a person crazy. I lost 10 kg from hunger and snapped at my family a lot too. The budae jjigae I ate after 3 weeks tasted insanely good.
Nerve review: Double-jaw surgery is surgery that cuts bone, meaning the skin has to be kept pulled open. In other words, the skin gets pulled outward, which means the nerves are pulled too. As the nerves are stretched, they become numb, and since nerves are tissue that recovers slowly, for the first month after surgery I had no sensation at all, then it slowly came back with a strange, foreign sensation. I’m not lying, I think it took 1.5 to 2 years for everything to normalize..? Sensation comes back in 1-2 months, but it feels different from what other skin feels. It’s a very foreign sensation. To compare it, it feels like a tissue that had been wrapped in something for 15 years, then the wrapping is removed and it’s being stroked..? Anyway, it eventually does normalize, but it takes a very long time, so please be patient and wait. For reference, the sensation at the tip of my chin came back the latest, and that foreign sensation also took the longest to normalize.
Swelling review: A face like you’re holding one orange in each cheek lol. That lasts about a month, and the unnatural swelling seems to last about 2 months. Minor swelling goes down over 6 months to 1 year. Even after 2 months, when I looked in the mirror, it still had this somewhat greasy, puffy look.
Double-jaw surgery is one of the biggest surgeries among those that change the external appearance of the face. So I strongly recommend having it done at an oral and maxillofacial surgery department in a dental hospital, not a plastic surgery clinic. Cost is important too, but everyone knows how important the face is, and it’s the face you’ll have for life, so have surgery safely. For people with money, I recommend a university hospital for peace of mind because it’s done in a general hospital, so if anything happens during surgery they can respond immediately, and since a professor performs the surgery, I think the safety is the best. During my pre-op consultation, they even suggested whether I should do my cheekbones too, so they paid close attention to the aesthetic aspects as well. Of course, I didn’t do my cheekbones lol.
Side effects: My nose got a bit bigger. There are two reasons for this. First, during surgery, some muscle near the side of the nose or somewhere gets pulled, so the nasal tip and alar wings actually spread a bit sideways. Second, because my large jaw made my nose less noticeable, once my jaw became smaller, my nose started drawing relatively more attention. Before surgery, I had never thought about my nose at all, but after surgery, all I could see was my nose. But when I looked at my pre-op photos focusing on the nose, I realized my nose had been big. In other words, because the jaw got smaller, the nose had a relatively stronger presence. The second side effect is that I developed sinusitis/rhinitis. I had never had rhinitis in my life, but for 2 years after surgery, whenever I ate, I used so much tissue wiping runny nose + pus/inflammatory discharge, kept sneezing, and pus would flow even when I was just sitting still.. It’s much better now, but I really suffered from sinusitis.
Even if I went back to that time, I think I would still have double-jaw surgery at a university hospital. Since it’s a major surgery, I really studied a lot and read a lot of reviews, so if anyone has questions, ask in the comments and I’ll answer sincerely! As I was too, I know how much you must be thinking and worrying. Please feel free to ask.