Dear 65GS.com faithful,
I wanted to update everyone as to how this week's two surgeries went. As feared, it has been quite an ordeal. The Wednesday surgeries were extremely tough. As usual, the cancer surgeon should have used more anaesthetic and it took a very long time to completely remove all the cancer. The surgery started at 9:30 am and there was a long wait while the pathology lab looked over what was removed. The surgeon made a decent guess but there was still some cancerous tissue left. So there was a second round of cutting in the early afternoon. They didn't finally bandage me up and send me home until around 3:30 pm.
That night wasn't so bad. I'm not sure why though. I had to get up at 4:15 to be at the second surgery site at 5:30 am on Thursday. I guess the pre-operation process went okay. I don't remember anything about it. However, when I woke in the recovery room I was obviously extremely weak. I could hardly move, much less make to a car to come home. I didn't have to argue much, the reconstructive surgeon concluded I would have to spend the night in the hospital. However, that didn't go well. For whatever reason, they couldn't manage to find a bed for me. I stayed in the recovery room from about 12 noon to 9:30 pm. I'm extremely thankful to the recovery room nurse that stayed with me long past her shift.
When I finally got a bed in the hospital the night nurse was also kind and helpful. The pain medications allowed me to sleep a bit so that I could recover my strength some. By the morning (Friday) I could walk to the bathroom and felt strong enough to be discharged. It took some fumbling to make that happen, but I was finally home at noon.
I'm not much to look at. My face is a bloody mess and, as expected, my new nose is an ugly blob of flesh. The surgeon ran into some sort of problem securing the flesh on my nose. As a result I have stitches along the left side of my cheek to my lip and probably another mysterious stitch in the middle of my lip. The flesh around my left eye is badly bruised and swollen. The skin graph from my forehead has a blob of flesh carrying the blood supply from my forehead to the reconstructed nose. That blob is also obstructing my left eye making seeing difficult. My body seems to have effectively shutdown and it is taking time to get all systems operational once more. I've had to write this in small periods of time before my eyes became too tired to continue.
The good news is that the reconstructive surgeon did what would seem to be the impossible. He created from a flap of forehead skin a first approximation of a nose. Moreover, while it is ugly, it is already doing its job: allowing me to breath. I was really dreading these first few days being only able to breath through my mouth, but even at this early stage the nose allowing me to breath a bit when eating. That's a big improvement in the comfort level.
That's the status report to this afternoon. The first follow-up appointment with the reconstructive surgeon is this Tuesday. I hope things will start to improve from here. Sadly, we know more about the insides of an internal combustion engine than our own bodies. Still, it appears the worst has over.
Edouard
