At 13 years old Misha Gajewski has to undergo a jaw surgery to fix a face she is just getting used to.

Misha is a freelance journalist whose work has been featured on Vice, BBC and CTV News, among others. She is also a journalism Professor at Seneca College and a scriptwriter for the popular Youtube channel SciShow. Misha has a degree in business and psychology from Western University and a Masters in science journalism from City University London. She also has a cat named Satan and when she’s not writing in her pyjamas she can be found exploring the world or repurposing old furniture. She is @mishagajewski

This story originally aired on May 3, 2019 in an episode titled “Confidence.”

Story Transcript

I’m eight years old and I’m in a dentist waiting room and I’m pumped.  See, this dentist waiting room is unlike any other dentist waiting room I've ever been in.  There is not a single gross germy wooden-bead-metal, contraption in sight. Instead, there is a play castle.  And I’m talking Disney Princess fairytale kind of castle. It’s the shit.

But I’m called into the doctor’s office and I’m sat in the chair and this joy that I've been feeling because of this awesome waiting room that they have starts to wane when the dentist tells my mom and I that I don't know how to swallow properly.  

See, up until this point, I thought I was doing a perfectly fine job at this task.  It’s a basic human function. I’m pretty sure I got this, dude. But, according to the dentist, I did not got this.  What was happening when I swallowed, my tongue would push against my front teeth and this, to the dentist’s horror, was giving me an overbite, a.k.a. chipmunk teeth.  

So I got outfitted with a really fancy contraption.  It was this kind of retainer thing and in the middle of it was a pink, plastic rolling-pin like device.  So every time I swallowed I'd have to roll this rolling pin back. I wasn’t super thrilled that this was in my mouth.  Number one, the glue that fused it in there ruined every meal that day. It also made eating sandwiches really hard. The bread would get stuck in it, which was super gross.  

But the alternative was spikes, and so if you didn’t swallow properly you would puncture your tongue.  I’m convinced that orthodonture is just medieval torture in disguise.

Eventually, I learned how to swallow like a normal and I figured I was done with this foray into orthodontics until I met Dr. Dankus.  This woman is the epitome of perfection. She has that perfect bob with not a hair out of place. She's the kind of woman that owns like 18 versions of the exact same dress.  

She tells me when I first meet her that my lower jaw isn’t big enough or substantial enough to support my lower teeth and so, if we don’t fix this immediately, all my lower teeth are going to fall out.  I still have nightmares about my teeth falling out. I hate her because she just told an 11-year-old kid that her face sucked. What a bitch.

So to fix this problem of my teeth possibly falling out in the future, I need to have jaw surgery.  But before that can happen I need to stop growing. Now, the signs of at least a girl finishing her growth period is… or at least physical growth period, not mental.  That continues forever. Is her first period and a bone fusing in your hand. So I think I’m good for another couple of years.

But one day when I’m 13, I’m sitting on the toilet and I notice blood in my underwear and I go through all of the stages of grief.  First, there is denial. I think this is internal bleeding that’s just somehow become external.

Then there's bargaining, like, “Oh, please let it be internal bleeding.  Or maybe I just cut myself on my leg. I don't know.”

Then we get anger because I’m done growing and I didn’t even make it past 5’2”.  What is this? Like was it really too much for my genes to go for 5”4”? Just the average height.  Come on! But, no.

Then comes acceptance.  So I realize I now have to tell the orthodontist that I've become a woman.  I’m a 13-year-old kid. I don't want to tell my mother I got my period let alone an orthodontist.  But I don't see another way out of this, so there I am, sat in a chair, telling an orthodontist it’s time.  I honestly hoped the chair had swallowed me whole but it didn’t.

Nonetheless, this set in motion a series of events that were completely out of my control and I was scared because the vain part of me was terrified I was going to come out ugly.  The self-conscious part of me was very worried about what my middle-school peers were going to say because they make fun of you for wearing the wrong brand of t-shirt let alone coming back to school with your face rearranged.  So I can only imagine the torment that’s going to come when I walk back into school with a new face.

But because I’m 13, I deal with this in the most 13-year-old way possible and I become, according to my family, a nightmare hell child.  There were a lot of moments of just listening to Simple Plan at very loud volumes but there is also even more outrageous acts of defiance, like, once, I locked myself in the car in the garage all day long.  I mean I did my homework in there, I ate in there, and no matter who told me, “You should probably get out of the car,” it didn’t matter. My mom tried. My dad tried. My brother tried. Even my grandmother, at one point, tried.  

This all ended with me being like, “Fine, if you don’t want me in the car, I'll run away from home.”  And if you run away from home in the dead of Canadian winter, you make it exactly one block without a coat.  So that’s as far as I made it and I turned back around.

It really didn’t matter how many rebellious acts I did or how much of an asshole I was, the day came where I was laying on a gurney with one of those stupid paper gowns, that doesn’t really cover the back of you for some reason, waiting to be rolled into a surgery room while my mom wonders out loud mostly about if I'll actually wake up from the anesthesia or if the surgeon, who is a very lovely man but kind of has hands the size of baseball gloves, has the dexterity not to mangle my petite, chinless face.  

But before I know it, I’m being given laughing gas and anesthesia and then I’m being gently shaken awake by a nurse and my mom telling me I really need to get up now because the next surgery has started.  

So I put my hands underneath my shoulders and I push up and I fall right back down onto my new face.  I think, “Okay. It’s not like waking up from a nap. Let’s try it one more time.” Up I go, right back down.  

At this point my mom’s whisper-screaming at me to let her help me and I’m being defiant but, eventually, I sit up and navigate the intricacies of putting on a t-shirt stoned.  It does not go well. But I make it home and then I spend the next week in recovery, which mostly consists of me lying on a couch watching daytime television, drooling, because when they did the surgery they cut the nerves in my face so I couldn’t feel anything.  

During that whole week, I avoided mirrors at all cost.  I mean, I even went to the bathroom in the dark to not look at my reflection because I was so terrified at what I would see.  But the day came where I would have to go back to school really soon so I figured I might as well figure out what I’m working with.  

So I walk up to the mirror and then I slowly look up, and it’s a horror show.  There is a huge bandage plastered on my face that’s covered in drool and ice cream stains and blood.  And because they took my wisdom teeth out, my face is three times larger than it normally is and there's bruising.  I immediately burst into tears.

And then I realize that crying is not helping this situation or my looks in any way, shape or form so we better cut that out right now.  I start to dread going back to school and I know there's really no way to get out of it because, in my household, the only way you get out of going to school is if you're projectile vomiting or you have a fever, so we’re going to have to face the music.  

My mom drops me off at school and I’m waiting in line for the teachers to let us in.  A kid from my class comes up to me and he says, “Hey, who are you? Are you new here?”  

All of the fears I had come rushing in and I’m like, “No.  No, I’m Misha.”

He's like, “No, you're not.”  

“Yes, I am.”  Because I am. I am me.  I just have a slightly different face.  

And apart from this one kid, everything else is okay.  My friends don’t relentlessly mock me. They think I look a bit weird but, overall, like myself.  Eventually, the bruising goes away and the swelling comes down and my new face becomes my face, and I become okay with my face.  In fact, I like this face better because at least this face won’t let my lower teeth fall out. Thank you.