Megan Birdsall has a cold. A knit cap covers her straight blondish-red hair. She&#8217;s poking around near the piano at Jardine&#8217;s looking for something, then sound-checks the microphone.</p><p>It&#8217;s early on a Wednesday evening, and after her trio warms up the room, Birdsall, 29, a vibrant and tiny woman, steps onstage and points a video camera toward the audience.</p><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s amazing that you&#8217;re here,&#8221; she says before launching into cold-be-damned, torch-jazz takes on &#8220;Too Close for Comfort&#8221; and &#8220;Old Devil Moon&#8221; and then a languid, full-throated version of the Beatles&#8217; &#8220;Something.&#8221;</p><p>What most of those who fill the room know as they listen is how amazing it is that Birdsall is standing in front of them and singing again.</p><p>It was exactly a year-minus-a-day earlier, on Nov. 27, 2007, when a Dallas oral surgeon sliced Birdsall&#8217;s facial muscles, replaced her decaying jawbones with titanium implants and straightened a pinched windpipe that threatened her life.</p><p>Late last April, when she sang a comeback gig in the same Main Street club, she found out she could, in fact, sing again, though her doctor kept pressing her to slow down and let her mouth properly heal.</p><p>She&#8217;s still healing, and every now and then when she cocks her head and opens her mouth as if to pop a plugged ear, it&#8217;s a reminder that she&#8217;s got a long way to go before everything works the way it&#8217;s supposed to.</p><p>Playing only one club gig a month leaves room for other things, so Birdsall has been working on what would be her third CD.</p><p>Those who&#8217;ve grown accustomed to the young singer&#8217;s pop-inflected jazz may be surprised by the project&#8217;s new direction.</p><p>But, as Megan Birdsall has discovered in the last year, when life deals you a curve ball like the one that bore down on her, it don&#8217;t mean a thing &#8212; apologies to Duke Ellington &#8212; if you don&#8217;t take a swing.</p><p>It was an April morning in 2007 when Birdsall&#8217;s reign of pain began. She woke up, couldn&#8217;t open her mouth and wondered how she&#8217;d be able to sing a studio session that day.</p><p>A muscle relaxant helped, and soon she learned she probably had a routine case of temporomandibular (TMJ) disorder, which typically involves clicking and tightening of the jawbone. But the pain never went away, even as she sang jazz gigs regularly around town.</p><p>Eventually an MRI revealed a far more serious condition. The cartilage attaching her jaw and skull had disappeared, and bone scraped against bone. Her mandibles, or jawbones, had eroded precipitously. This kind of rare auto-immune disorder most often occurs in women and for some it&#8217;s thought to be connected to hormonal changes that begin in puberty. Birdsall had just turned 28.</p><p>But even worse: As the shape of her mouth and head slowly shifted it put backward pressure on her spine and crimped her trachea. A typical windpipe measures 14 mm; Birdsall&#8217;s was down to 4 mm. That was astounding, to the few around her who knew what was happening, given the power of Birdsall&#8217;s singing voice.</p><p>By August she and her mother, Jeri Birdsall, were meeting at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas with Larry Wolford, a facial reconstruction specialist, and she and her family were fretting over the riskiness of the procedure. And the enormous cost &#8212; more than $30,000 just to get the titanium prostheses made, a requirement for scheduling the surgery, and at least $100,000 more in medical procedures and hospitalization.