Day 65: A Few Steps Back

So the last few days have been...rough.  I tell my patients all the time that healing is not always strictly linear, there will be good days and bad days. Unfortunately my last few days have been bad days. Remember how I said that the muscles spasms were growing fewer and weaker? Well they started back up on Monday with a dull cramping pain that was pretty easy to ignore, but by Wednesday the spasms were no longer dull but were so sharp they took my breathe away, again.
 I don't know why the pain has come back with such force. I have started eating more foods and I have also been more aggressively stretching to gain that vertical opening that I have fallen below the curve on so maybe with those two combined factors I've irritated the muscles into full rebellion? Wednesday I came home from work took the muscle relaxer and went straight to bed. Thursday I switched out my rubber bands from the 6oz weight down to the 3oz weights. Hopefully a couple days at the 3 oz bands won't slow my orthodontic work too much, but it was one of the few things I could think to do to diminish the pain.  Taking Alleve is helping, but does not stop pain.
Anyways I see Dr. M again in 3 days, so by the law of Doctor's Visits I should wake up pain free that morning, right?

And on a positive note, I am Finally having a little success with vertical opening!  I added a popsicle stick to my stack today and reached 30mm of passive opening!! (40-50mm is "normal") Still some work to do, but I was stuck at 22mm for a  couple weeks, so its nice to have some progress!