One mother had to have all her teeth removed and her jaw changed three times after she got an infected tooth. Megan Maselli, 36, needed a root canal and two teeth had to be removed after her dentist noticed they were infected during a routine appointment.
But within days, she was in agony and diagnosed with osteomyelitis in her lower jaw, an inflammation caused by an infection elsewhere in the body. She became so infected that doctors had to remove almost her entire lower jaw and replace it with a metal rod, removing all of her lower and upper teeth to prevent further infection.
The devastated Megan was forced to undergo risky surgery twice more due to complications and infections. Doctors first tried to repair her mouth using her femur before successfully replacing it with part of the tibia.
She even had to reconstruct part of her neck with chest muscles. The mother of two has lost 170 pounds since the beginning of her ordeal while struggling to eat.
She said: “I hardly leave home anymore. I was a beautiful girl with a young son then and he was traumatized by it.
“I almost gave my daughter a ticket to graduate from high school last year for fear of ruining her day. I lost half of my breast as part of this operation I had, I have scars on my thighs, legs and face.
“I am now 36 and I am disabled, I have no teeth and I stayed at home without working. We struggle, my child can’t leave home to go to college because she works full time to help me pay my bills.
“Half of my jaw was eaten before anyone took me seriously. If I can avoid looking in the mirror, I do. “
In April 2017, Megan of Saratoga County, New York, USA, had a root canal and molar removed on each side of his lower teeth by an oral surgeon because they were too infected to be saved by filling. She said: “I felt it, it hurts – he couldn’t take it out and I heard a crack.
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“I didn’t know if it was a jaw or a tooth. They think that when the dentist pulled out my teeth, the crack may have broken the bone because it was weakened.
“It was painful the next day, I had nothing, no antibiotics. The next day it was really painful in my jaw and it was coming down my face. “
After another four days, the pain still did not subside, so she took an X-ray, which revealed that she had osteomyelitis of the lower jaw. Osteomyelitis is an inflammation or swelling that occurs in the bone and is caused by an infection that has spread elsewhere in the body or has occurred in the bone itself.
Megan during her long treatment, which led to the removal of all her teeth (Image: SWNS)
Meigan believes she developed the condition due to a tooth infection caused by root canal treatment. “He looked into my mouth and said, ‘I’m not going to touch you, you have to go back to the people who did this,'” Megan said.
“I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do. I was scared.”
She returned home, but woke up the next day with a huge abscess under her chin and rushed to the emergency room of Albany Memorial Hospital and received a two-week course of antibiotics. “The abscess was still there and just getting worse,” said the unemployed Meigan.
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“It didn’t go down at all, it hurt every night. I was on the floor crying and there was nothing I could do.
“I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I had green pus dripping down the back of my mouth when I pressed my jaw, the green stuff came out from behind. “
In November 2017, she visited the Albany Medical Center and after seeing her condition, the nurses quickly took her to see a doctor. She said: “He came out and said ‘take her to the traffic police scanner now.’
She lost all her teeth (Image: SWNS)
“My jaw, from the back of my mouth to the middle of my chin, where the abscess was, was gone. He said, ‘Your teeth are in a mess’ and there was nothing they could do for me.”
After being reassigned from two other medical facilities, she was finally sent to an oral surgeon at Montefiore Hospital. She said: “They said they would remove the lower half of my infected jaw and essentially clean everything and put a stick there.
“I was petrified, I was so scared. My biggest fear was my teeth, it always has been. I didn’t have bad teeth, I always went to the dentist. “
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Megan underwent the six-hour operation in January 2018 and returned home a few days later, although her face was still severely swollen. The former certified nurse said: “My whole face was numb, it was swollen to the size of a balloon.
“I had a few caesareans and it was worse. I didn’t know that your face could swell so much, I didn’t know it was humanly possible. “
In March 2018, during an examination, she was told that the rod had aggravated the infection and she had to have another eight hours of surgery to restore her jaw with the help of a bone from her thigh. She said: “I was so scared when they talked about taking bones from somewhere else in my body – I have never experienced anything like this.
“I came out with a scar on my hips four inches long, which reaches right in the middle of my back. The lower part of my face is numb, from the middle of my lip to the corner of my mouth and chin down I have no sensation and this started after the operation. “
Megan had problems after a tooth infection (Image: SWNS)
Despite all the procedures, her face still felt irritated and she returned to Albany Medical Center in June 2018. Another CAT scan showed that the bone from her thigh was completely dead in her face and moving up through her lip.
Surgeons removed it from her jaw and tried to clean the area, as well as removing all of her teeth to prevent further spread of the infection. After making sure that every infection of the dead bone had passed, she was taken for a serious 18-hour operation to remove bone from her shin and then rebuild her jaw in September 2019.
She said: “I remember crying, I had a scar on my chest that ran under my chest all the way to my neck, and I had braces all the way. Tubes and respirators protruded from my legs.
“My face was so swollen, it was purple and there was blood everywhere, they tried to clean me, but there was so much blood. I had pieces of blood in my hair and ears. ”
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She also had a piece of gauze stapled to her face to cover her jaw, which was removed a few weeks later. Megan remembers: “It was scary – I had no skin, it was like yellow.
“Everything was muscle. You could see the muscle they were using from my chest.
Since then, she has had three more surgical procedures to thin the thick skin around her neck, which was added from her breasts to protect her jaw during surgery.
Meigan has several long scars (Image: SWNS)
Megan’s frequent hospitalizations, as well as her disability, prevented her from working from her original root canal in 2017 to attend university.
She said: “When I eat, it’s always soft food, I live on eggs, pasta, chicken and burgers. But the textures are hard for me, so I usually eat a few bites, after which my jaw tightens and gets tired.
“I can’t even go out during the winter months unless it’s absolutely necessary, because trembling is the worst. Because your jaw is so tense, it’s probably the worst pain for me.”
Although fortunately all her procedures were covered by insurance, she wants to share her story to help others suffering from medical complications feel less alone. She wants to talk about her attempt to be transmitted by medical professionals, as it has become impossible to know who is to blame for her complications.
She said: “People should not be treated in this way, where do you go when it is too difficult to prove medically guilty? I called so many doctors to see if they could help me and everyone told me to go back to where I started.
“She cries every day. This is the worst. The first and last thought of my days always relates to my face in some way.
“The amount of stress on my body is like going to bed at 32 and waking up at 70. I want other people like me to know they’re not alone.”
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