LONDON: Holly Strevens, a 34-year-old resident of South East England claimed to had five surgeries and 12 screws on the left side of their face as she dislocated her jaw while eating a stacked burger of an American fast-food restaurant.
Reports in British media cited that the harrowing incident occurred back in 2014 when the woman dislocated her jaw while stretching her mouth to eat a huge burger after which she was diagnosed with temporomandibular joint (TMJ) syndrome – a disorder of the jaw muscles and nerves caused by injury or inflammation to the joint holding jawbone and skull.
The Portsmouth resident, who undergoes multiple surgeries to get prosthetic joints, now decided to have the right side of her jaw replaced after suffering chronic pain which even leads to non-epileptic seizures.
She undergoes open-joint arthroplasty of the jaw as the surgeon replaced her tissue with an artificial disc in July 2017 however her condition didn’t improve as she was forced to have the left side of her jaw replaced. Following the surgeries, the 34-year-old has also got a scar from her ear lobe to her eyebrow.
Narrating the ordeal she goes through over the course of time, she regretted eating the fast food item saying “it can happen to anyone who opens their mouth too wide”.
Recalling the years before the horrific encounter, she said “I was healthy before eating my KFC burger in September 2014” and furthermore negated having any king of underlying health issues. Temporomandibular joint syndrome just came from nowhere, the Britisher added.
“I was eating a KFC at home whilst watching the TV and all of a sudden I had a loud pop noise. It was my left jaw joint. It looked normal but it felt horrendous and kept locking and unlocking”, Holly said while explaining the moment she encountered the medical issue that has even taken her job. I lost my job as a part-time office administrator due to the unruly seizures, she mentioned.
The jawbone injury has ruined my life, she said while adding that the chronic pain non-epileptic seizures are the only thing she felt in the last years.
“I even can’t eat an apple, neither anything that needs to be chewed due to the pain and I had a lot of time off as I was in and out of the doctors and the pain was affecting my daily life”. The woman also claimed to develop arthritis in her left jaw too with cysts on the joint.
The woman went on to say that the miserable incident has changed her life as she lost her independence completely. Besides physical issues, she said my mental health has also gone worse and I also suffered seizures while being alone.
Holly Strevens hoped that fast-food chains reduce the size of their burgers to prevent this from happening to someone else.
