POST-OP POST

(WARNING: Graphic surgical wound images ahead.)

Night before surgery

Last Monday's surgery went better than I worried it might, even though the cancer was more extensive than my doctor thought it was initially.  She kept asking me when I first noticed the cancer, which I thought meant the red spot on the end of my nose.  That was last summer.  Then I told her about the change in my nose contour, very slight, that I noticed the year before.  On the roundest part of my nose tip, the skin seemed to go flat - ever so slightly - and didn't reflect light like the rest of my nose did.

"Ah, yes.  Of course," she said.  "That is likeliest when it began."  Dr. B is from Russia, by way of West Germany, then to Pennsylvania, where she has lived and practiced medicine for the last 30 years.  She speaks English beautifully (better than I do) with the most charming accent.  (I thought she was from Ukraine.)

She had to cut slices from my nose three times before pathology gave her the all clear to proceed with the graft.  I will post some photos my daughter and I took.  I wasn't allowed to have Karie in the room with me, so some of these were after I had been bandaged between slices, and the next day.

The final cut before graft.

Daughter, whose sense of humor about such things is as twisted as mine, said the wound above reminded her of a slice of Italian sausage on pizza.  My face was swollen from the several injections of anesthetic, and from being tugged this-way-and-that by tissue forceps.  Took almost four days for it to return to normal.  My upper lip looked as if it had been cosmetically enhanced.

 My behind-the-ear lift, graft skin source.  Used 4-0 braided something - nylon?  Feels like a toothbrush back there.  

When Dr. B pulled one suture through, it sounded like a guitar string.  Did you know that most of the ear parts are located behind your ears, inside your skull?  Had a hearing test at Lebanon VA hospital last Saturday and the audiologist tested back there.  (I have perfect hearing, turns out.  Went there because of tinnitus - sounds like my head is full of crickets, tree-frogs and cicadas, all singing at once and at full volume.  Turns out the culprit is amlodipine - Norvasc.)

Headed home, with first nose cone.  Puffy-faced, hard to smile because mid-face was still numb

.

Call me Cyrano.  

Tuesday, we went out for coffee, mostly so I could get used to being out in public with my nose cone.  Karie suggested I put orange and white strips of duct tape on the dressing like a safety cone.  I get no respect.

After second bandage.  Swelling down quite a bit.  

Still not allowed to take photos at doc's office.  I said to heck with that and took it off last night to see what was underneath.  That yellow thing on top of the graft is called a bolster.  It is stitched down onto my nose, through the graft, to help hold everything in place.  It's loaded with some sort of petroleum-jelly-like stuff, which melted and soaked through the first dressing, loosening the tape holding the dressing in place.  I figured I could replace it myself.  Well, of course I can!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

 Okay, maybe not.  I didn't have the proper materials on hand.  The paper tape doesn't stick to my skin and I kept adding more on top of the other, which also didn't stick.  I called Karie.  She said my nose looked like those baby vultures in some Disney movie she watched.  Or maybe a baby eagle's beak.

I get no respect.  Did I say that already?  Well, let me say it again...NO RESPECT!

New bandage, with Karie's help.

It helps to have an extra pair of hands to replace the bandages.  Grandson said it looks like strips of Silly Putty...just like his mother.  I give up.  

This will do until I can have my nurse redress the wound on Tuesday.  I just hope I didn't introduce any bacteria which will cause the graft to rot off.  I was very careful.

I had a great team who took the best of care.  I especially liked my nurse, who did a good bit of the work and answered my questions.  Her name is Katie.  She's about half my age and a no-nonsense professional, very patient-oriented in her care.  All in all, everything went well.  

But then I knew it probably would because I went in wearing a cloak of kind thoughts and good wishes, plus I had on my magical, lucky socks!

(PS: Please wear sunscreen with as high a SPF-value you can find, and limit your exposure to only a few minutes at a time during early morning or late afternoon hours.  Have your doctor check your skin at least once a year and learn what to look for when you check yourself.  My cancer likely started 50 years ago when I fell asleep on the beach in Gulfport, Mississippi.  I was face down for almost two hours during the worst time of day.  Had sheets of blisters on everything that wasn't covered by bathing suit.  Had sun-poisoning (radiation?), had to stay in bed for almost a week, was sick as a dog.

But it doesn't take something like that to cause skin cancers, so please be careful.)

If I Only Had...

http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/wp-content/images/wizard_oz_pics/wizard_oz_11.jpg

Tomorrow I will have the tip of my nose (or a large portion thereof) cut off.  Not to spite my face (yes, I've heard that so many times in the last month!) but because of skin cancer; basal cell carcinoma, thank goodness.

This thing started last summer as a crusty spot on the end of my nose, very tiny, like an errant dandruff flake that fell from my head.  I brushed it off and thought no more about it.  Until the next one, which was more difficult to brush away.  When it grew slightly larger and turned bright pink, I thought it was perhaps a mosquito bite.  When I finally realized this just might be cancer, the pink bump had become a slight depression surrounded by a raised rim.  This was in September.  

My PCP (primary care provider) at the VA clinic confirmed my suspicion and began the process of getting a referral to a civilian dermatologist.  This was in late September.  The earliest appointment I could find in two counties was for February.  A biopsy ruled out squamous cell carcinoma (thank you, Universe!) and surgery was scheduled for a month later.

I was doing well, emotionally, with this idea of having my nose lopped off and the Mohs procedure which will cause my face to be sliced in a wonky zig-zag fashion to cut a circle of skin to cover the hole at the end of my nose, then stitch all that back together again...like Humpty Dumpty, maybe.

But as the hour draws nearer, I feel more like the Cowardly Lion than Pollyanna.  Oh, I'll be okay when morning comes, and I'm a big girl now and won't cry and all that, but somewhere inside me there is a little girl who feared getting injections so much that she screamed all the way to the doctor's office - even when she was just going in for a check-up.  (Mama, I am so very sorry about that.)

I do wish I had a wizard who would give me a medal for courage to make it all better, though.

(Hope this isn't too gross-looking for the Internet.)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Dreams

We've all had them, those weird, unsettling dreams that wake you from deep sleep, putting you in a state of confusion and dismay.  Those dreams that when you first waken you think your real world is the dream and nothing seems right, that you need to go back to sleep - quick! - so your life will be okay again?  I call them whiskey-tango-foxtrot dreams.

I woke at 0315 today from such a dream about attending a veterans' reunion supposedly in the desert somewhere in the Middle East.  I was a corpsman assigned to a prison camp for American and European civilian "traitors", a good many of whom were Quakers doing field service work with refugees in the area.  Mixed in with the Quakers were, though, an equal number of people who had switched teams, so to speak; they'd joined the enemy.  (I'm tapdancing around what to call these political prisoners because it is difficult to see them as enemies.)

The reunion was for those of us who had served, gone home and presumably reclaimed our civilian, pre-war lives.  We were meeting in a huge mess tent that looked like a seafood restaurant I once went to somewhere along the South Carolina coast.  Above the entrance was a sign like the one above.  The civilians I was with, including my long deceased mother, couldn't understand the sign.  I told Mom it said "Welcome home."

"Why is it backwards?" my mother asked.

"So you can read it in the rearview mirrors as you are leaving camp,"  I said, "except the ones when we left to go home read Farewell."

"That makes no sense," she said.  "No sense at all.  Why would anyone look back when leaving such hell?"

Maybe to make sure it wasn't gaining on us, my brother, Mac (Viet Nam vet), told her.

None of this makes any sense.

When I was awake enough to understand that my stumbling around in the dark of my house to find the latrine was not real, old feelings of sadness and grief and anger swept in and took my down.  Will this stuff never end, I whimpered to myself, then felt really chicken---t for feeling sorry for myself.  I mean, for crying out loud, I wasn't there!  I didn't go through any of the stuff in the dream, ever.  What is wrong with me?!

Maybe I'm going november-uniform-tango-sierra.