Can YOU see the difference?

I don't know WHAT the heck is going on but it's rather strange. Obviously, your cheeks ripped up following installation of new hardware is to be expected and this has most certainly been the case, however the left side is toughening up quite nicely. The strange part comes in with the right side. Yesterday afternoon I noticed that my lower right jaw bone is quite bruised feeling and that I seemed to be swelling up on this side as well. (Heck, I'm a female thus the notion of water retention crossed my mind, but that tends to settle lower down & with remarkable symmetry.) Not really painful...the inside is definitely still tender and not healing over, but overall just achy throbbing sort of stuff. I look like I have the half-mumps! I'm trying to smile evenly but it won't move the same.

I'm a little leery of just going to the hospital clinic as they are never fans of anything mouth or tooth related. They'll either just hand me a script for antibiotics to (they assume) make me feel like the issue has been addressed, or they say,"you probably have a bad tooth, go see your Dentist", who says ,"your teeth are fine, go to the clinic"....and so the circle goes. This was the trend when first trying to figure out what was going on with my crazy jaw-TMJ- stuff when it first started becoming a hassle.

So, here I wait for a call-back from my Ortho's office. If this is normal I'm quite happy to keep salt-water rinsing and wait it out. Or if this is strange, and a sore has become infected, I'd rather kick it out before it gets worse. I'm just not a fan of antibiotics unless it's absolutely necessary. Hmmmm. Anybody else have this happen?