Surgery
OK, so here is my first official post :)
I went in for my surgery on Friday. For those of you who don't know what was going on, I had to have a frontal sinus obliteration done. This was a result of an incident in February. I had a sinus infection that abcessed into my left eye socket. This could have killed me if it had not been caught in time and had gotten to my brain. As it is, at the time of surgery there was still a 50% chance I would lose my sight in that eye. Luckily that didn't happen.
So, the first surgery, and eye decompression, caused the muscle on the side of my eye to shift so that it is now blocking off the passage that the frontal sinus uses to drain. So, the sinus has no drainage path and was completely full. In order to prevent another abcess, I had to have this second surgery. Basically, they turned it into a non-functioning sinus.
If you're squeamish, you may want to skip this next part.
I went into the operating room Friday morning at around 8 a.m. They sliced my scalp from ear to ear, pulled down the skin, and sawed into the bone in front of my sinus. They emptied it out and then used a drill to clean out all of the tissue that makes the mucus. They took a little fat from my belly (I tried to convince them to take extra, but that didn't work) and packed the sinus cavity so I don't have an air pocket in my skull. Then they put the bone back and attached it with a couple of small wires and sewed my skin back on.
I was in recovery at around 1 p.m. but I had a bad reaction to the anesthesia and didn't get to my room until about 4:30. I had a male nurse named Rich that afternoon, and he was very nice. There was a med student in the surgery, and she was there all night, too. She checked in on me several times overnight.
I got to go home Saturday afternoon, and Mom is staying with me 'cause I can't put the bacitracin on my scalp myself. I'm still sore and swollen, but the stitches are healing well. They may come out on Wednesday when I have my follow-up with the surgeon. So now it remains to be seen how much of my hair they had to shave. I can't tell right now with the bandages. If I have a very obvious shaved line in my hair, I will probably just shave it all off and donate my hair to Locks of Love. We'll see.
I went in for my surgery on Friday. For those of you who don't know what was going on, I had to have a frontal sinus obliteration done. This was a result of an incident in February. I had a sinus infection that abcessed into my left eye socket. This could have killed me if it had not been caught in time and had gotten to my brain. As it is, at the time of surgery there was still a 50% chance I would lose my sight in that eye. Luckily that didn't happen.
So, the first surgery, and eye decompression, caused the muscle on the side of my eye to shift so that it is now blocking off the passage that the frontal sinus uses to drain. So, the sinus has no drainage path and was completely full. In order to prevent another abcess, I had to have this second surgery. Basically, they turned it into a non-functioning sinus.
If you're squeamish, you may want to skip this next part.
I went into the operating room Friday morning at around 8 a.m. They sliced my scalp from ear to ear, pulled down the skin, and sawed into the bone in front of my sinus. They emptied it out and then used a drill to clean out all of the tissue that makes the mucus. They took a little fat from my belly (I tried to convince them to take extra, but that didn't work) and packed the sinus cavity so I don't have an air pocket in my skull. Then they put the bone back and attached it with a couple of small wires and sewed my skin back on.
I was in recovery at around 1 p.m. but I had a bad reaction to the anesthesia and didn't get to my room until about 4:30. I had a male nurse named Rich that afternoon, and he was very nice. There was a med student in the surgery, and she was there all night, too. She checked in on me several times overnight.
I got to go home Saturday afternoon, and Mom is staying with me 'cause I can't put the bacitracin on my scalp myself. I'm still sore and swollen, but the stitches are healing well. They may come out on Wednesday when I have my follow-up with the surgeon. So now it remains to be seen how much of my hair they had to shave. I can't tell right now with the bandages. If I have a very obvious shaved line in my hair, I will probably just shave it all off and donate my hair to Locks of Love. We'll see.