The temporomandibular joint heals on its own calendar, and the calendar is longer than anyone wants. Patients ask for a date; the joint offers a season. Much of my work is translating between the two.
Waiting well is not doing nothing. It is removing the load a joint cannot currently carry — the clenching, the gum, the habit of testing — and then, hardest of all, not interfering with the repair we cannot see. The body reads impatience as instruction: keep checking, keep guarding, keep bracing. A patient who stops auditing the joint hourly has begun treatment.
Twenty years in, the pattern holds: the outcomes I am proudest of belong less to what was done than to what was carefully not done, and to patients who learned to wait the way the joint waits — without commentary.