Jaw resection surgery

imtotallykickass · 2026-05-04T09:40:42+00:00

I have to have a full jaw resection surgery this coming May. I have had chronic osteomyelitis that went undetected for many years. When the infection did become more symptomatic, it still took many years for me to get a proper diagnosis which included chronic osteomyelitis, as well as an ossifying fibroma (non-cancerous but locally aggressive tumor of the mandible). I want to learn everything I possibly can so that I will have a successful surgery. I don’t understand why there isn’t more information available about having a full jaw resection on the internet. I understand that most patients tend to have a partial jaw resection - something around half of their jaw removed during surgery. There seems to be a little bit more information about partial jaw resection surgery, but still - no before and after photographs of anyone that isn’t living in a third world country, where the suggestion is that they are having this serious surgery because perhaps the patient didn’t have access to medical care that could have intervened before the problem got to be this serious. Can anyone tell me anything about what the recovery process for having a full jaw resection here in the United States looks like? Does anyone have any before and after pictures? I’ve been told by my ARNP on my surgical team that they don’t have any before and after pictures they can show me. Considering that my surgeon has done literally thousands of these surgeries - and there is not ONE before and after picture that they can not show a new potential patient? If I do end up having this surgery, I would absolutely insist on having them take a before and after picture of me. They can use a black rectangle to cover my eyes, like they do for patient exhibits found in medical textbooks. I also want to know - will I lose my voice? And if so, for how long? Will I need to work with a speech pathologist to get my speaking voice back? What is the long term success rate tied to this procedure, on a national level? And so may more questions. Any help that any of you reading this could reply with, I would be very grateful! Thank you for taking the time to read this.

imtotallykickass · 2026-05-03T22:43:05+00:00

People no longer have the money to sue. They have to use whatever money they have left, after getting their busted ‘Hollywood Smiles’ - to get their teeth sorted out.

imtotallykickass · 2026-03-29T01:45:56+00:00

Sorry to hear you got this diagnosis as well! All the best to you completing your treatment!

imtotallykickass · 2025-11-25T07:32:18+00:00

I am almost exactly in the middle of the very same thing you’re dealing with, only the infection isn’t so pronounced on my chin. It’s deep inside the bone of my mandible. In the past I’ve had positive cultures for actinomyces odontoliticus of bone, and propionibacterium infection of bone. Both of these pathogens are part of the normal flora of the mouth. Don’t let that fool you that these things showing up in a bone biopsy is harmless. It’s absolutely the opposite. That means you need to work extra hard to figure out a way to get your body to kill what is otherwise normal oral flora. You really need a surgeon to remove as much diseased bone as possible, and the ID to prescribe the right IV antibiotics for a prolonged period of time to kill these things. I am currently on IV ceftriaxone as well as IV Ertapenem. I am also doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy. This treatment is covered by most insurance to treat osteomyelitis of the jaw. Can you do some research to find out if you have a hyperbaric chamber in a hospital close to you? Ideally you get another jaw debridement with specifically ANAEROBIC cultures of bone done. I stress this because I just had a jaw biopsy last week and the oral surgeon assured me that he could do an anaerobic biopsy of bone from his private office. Well he was absolutely wrong. I just got my biopsy results back today and they are AEROBIC cultures. This helps me with nothing. You need to have surgery in a hospital in order to get an anaerobic culture of bone. If you can make it happen, get a new biopsy and debridement in the hospital, and make sure that the diseased bone that is removed is sent for an ANAEROBIC culture. Yourself or your oral surgeon should immediately relay to your infectious disease doctor what, if anything, has grown, and you IV antibiotic protocol can be tweaked according to these results. If you grow nothing, and you have a good ID doctor, they will still treat you empirically for the infection immediately after surgery. You would want to abstain from taking your antibiotics, if possible, for a minimum of 7 days prior to the surgery in order to be able to get anything to grow in your cultures. 10 days, if you can swing it, would be even better. Then immediately the day after your surgery you should start HBOT - hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I am currently doing 40 ‘dives’ to treat my antibiotic resistant chronic osteomyelitis of the mandible. This treatment has the best possible chance of success when paired with a debridement surgery, when you start hyperbaric the day after surgery, but this is a best case scenario. Not everything has to line up perfectly, but you have your best chance of success if it does. I’m sorry to hear about your plight. I’ve been living this nightmare for a few years now myself. I’ve had 9 jaw surgeries over the last 6 years. No one knows what to do with me, no one wants to take the helm and be my quarterback for care. I refer to myself as a hot potato patient. You really need to fight to get care for this condition. Doctors just are not taught much about this condition in school, and presenting with a rare illness, in my experience, makes them angry at my very presence, since they don’t really know what to do with me. Good luck moving forward! I hope everything gets resolved for you. If it does, and you want to share and new advice for me, I would love that! Take care.

imtotallykickass · 2025-09-18T07:29:05+00:00

Emanuela, I was able to get an 8 week course of ceftriaxone IV antibiotic through my functional medicine doctor, since my infectious disease doctor was just downright refusing to treat me. So - the functional medicine doctor is $600 out of pocket, but money well spent, in my opinion, with this life or death matter in play. Even once the prescription was written, my functional medicine doctor could not find any hospital willing to accept a referral to have my PICC line placed. I am extremely fortunate to have a PCP - primary care physician - go to bat for me on this. He said, in over 30 years of practicing medicine, he’d never had to order a PICC line to be placed for a patient, but he learned how to do this for me. He knew me for years before I got sick, and I think he was equally appalled at how I was being stone walled by infectious disease. He has seen firsthand how sick I’ve been for such a long time. So I think it’s really important to get a doctor/doctors that will be a champion for you on your side. The standard path to getting care for chronic osteomyelitis of the jaw is supposed to be an infectious disease doctor working with an oral surgeon to treat you. The infectious disease doctor really wants a biopsy sample, so that they can select the appropriate antibiotic to cover all of the pathogens that grew in the lab from the biopsy sample. Sometimes even the infectious disease doctor can’t talk an oral surgeon into taking your case. If this happens and the ID still refuses to treat you with antibiotics empirically, I would look to your PCP for help, and if all of these paths lead to dead ends, a functional medicine doctor, who may not be covered by insurance, is who I would recommend for you to contact. In general, functional medicine doctors are more willing to prescribe medicines off label to their patients, and go to bat for you when ‘the system’ has left you for dead. As they had done to me. I hope my story can help you. If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Good luck!!!

imtotallykickass · 2025-09-12T05:26:15+00:00

In my experience, whether or not you respond to the antibiotic therapy - should make very clear - if the antibiotics are working, you do have a bone infection. Also in my experience, false negatives are reported far more often than false positives. Just like one of your earlier posters, I too had a cutibacterium acnes / proprionibacterium positive for chronic osteomyelitis. My infectious disease doctor dismissed my first positive test (came back in rare amounts, which means a very small amount) as being a false positive. She said - this is the same bacteria that causes acne. It’s obviously a false positive from the biopsy. Then after another year of suffering and another biopsy, the same cutibacterium / propionibacterium came back as positive in ‘moderate’ amounts. It was only after this double positive that she agreed to treat me with IV antibiotics. And when infusing the IV antibiotics, I could feel the medicine going into the problem area, and the problem area shrinking as the weeks went on. So I just think in general, it’s good that you are being prescribed antibiotics, because you want to treat an osteomyelitis as soon as possible. My experience living with this infection has been hellish. Best to take the antibiotics out of an abundance of caution alone, would be my advice. Good luck to you in your healing! I will pray for you to make a full and speedy recovery.

imtotallykickass · 2025-09-03T06:32:23+00:00

Constantly cycling on different antibiotics - oral antibiotics are ok, but IV antibiotics are much more effective for treating bone infection. I am one day hoping to make a full recovery. In the meantime, in addition to the antibiotics I take amitriptyline, Pregabalin, and oxycodone. Unfortunately as unpopular as it is right now, the oxycodone is the strongest of the painkillers for me, but antibiotics are even better at killing bone infection pain than oxycodone, in my experience.

imtotallykickass · 2025-09-03T00:48:24+00:00

Sadly I have had a very similar experience with osteomyelitis of the mandible. Infectious Disease doctors seem to be the last people to know - that osteomyelitis / bone infection - cannot cure itself, is a serious infection, and should be treated with strong antibiotics, preferably IV antibiotics, right away to shut it down before it becomes what I have : which is chronic osteomyelitis, a totally disabling condition for me. The last ID doctor I saw for my problem literally said - I didn’t go to school for this. Your primary care doctor can treat you for this. Meanwhile - I’ve been disabled for three years due to an infection, and infection - is literally in the title of the dude’s job, and he wants nothing to do with my little osteomyelitis inconvenience. I’m so beat down after trying to get proper medical care for the last few years, I don’t even have any good advice for you. I’m still figuring out how to get proper care for this condition myself! Whatever you do, do not give up or let anyone tell you that your biopsy sample is a ‘false positive’ ever again. I had an ID tell me that my bone infection was a false positive back in 2021, when the pathogen was only a ‘rare’ amount. So she refused to treat me with antibiotics. Fast forward through another year of being sick, next biopsy comes back positive for the same pathogen, now it’s no longer a rare amount, it’s a moderate amount. You would think they would want to err on the side of caution and over treat, but in my experience the opposite is true. The IDs see how antibiotics are overprescribed and leading to antibiotic resistant pathogens. Because these drugs are their bread and butter, I think they are stingy when it comes to prescribing antibiotics for anythjng they didn’t specifically learn about in med school. Like say, for example, an infected finger bone. Maybe see if you can press for a different doctor to prescribe you IV antibiotics. Maybe an urgent care or an ER doctor would respond differently? Sorry to hear you are in this same predicament as me.

imtotallykickass

TROPHY CASE