No more Cancer! (and no more nose)
Yesterday the doc (and the handsome resident tee hee) informed me that the Cancer left town. Yay!
So as weird as this sounds, that was the easy part. At least for me...Ok I think that was the easy part for the doctors too. We all knew this cancer just wanted to destroy tissue but not to threaten anything else- like my life. And it did a good job. Cancer moved in, had a wild party and now we are left with the clean up.
I have two choices
One is to take skin from my forehead the other is to take skin from my left arm. The forehead will be scarred and my hairline would be damaged but the skin on my nose would probably match closer to the coloring of my face.
The arm is a trickier procedure because they have to create a template of skin that will fit the shape of the defect on my nose. The template will also include a long stretch of skin that will reach an artery on the side of my face near the jaw line. The skin and arteries from my arm will be lifted and attached to my face using a microscope. The nose part will be sutra-ed on, and then there will be like an umbilical cord of skin that will feed the nose skin blood from the artery on the side of my face. This will stay like this for a month to keep the new skins location alive.
The surgery will take 8 hours and then afterwards I will stay in the hospital for about a week. They have to make sure that there isn't any blood clotting.
Ok so yeah to be honest all the Mohs surgeries to get rid of the Cancer were pretty straight forward: "We will just cut out the bad parts."
This is the part of the journey that scares me.
I know it will be ok but, yeah I'm scared.
After the surgery this flap will stay there for about a month, I probably will turn into a vampire and only come out at night!
After a month I will have to come in every couple of weeks to get the new skin shaved off and trimmed so it starts looking like a nose.
When it's all done they say it will look great, but my nose will be lighter than the rest of my face so I will have to start wearing makeup and stuff to cover that up.
I think I’m going to go home for the weekend. I need to be around people and keep busy.
So as weird as this sounds, that was the easy part. At least for me...Ok I think that was the easy part for the doctors too. We all knew this cancer just wanted to destroy tissue but not to threaten anything else- like my life. And it did a good job. Cancer moved in, had a wild party and now we are left with the clean up.
I have two choices
One is to take skin from my forehead the other is to take skin from my left arm. The forehead will be scarred and my hairline would be damaged but the skin on my nose would probably match closer to the coloring of my face.
The arm is a trickier procedure because they have to create a template of skin that will fit the shape of the defect on my nose. The template will also include a long stretch of skin that will reach an artery on the side of my face near the jaw line. The skin and arteries from my arm will be lifted and attached to my face using a microscope. The nose part will be sutra-ed on, and then there will be like an umbilical cord of skin that will feed the nose skin blood from the artery on the side of my face. This will stay like this for a month to keep the new skins location alive.
The surgery will take 8 hours and then afterwards I will stay in the hospital for about a week. They have to make sure that there isn't any blood clotting.
Ok so yeah to be honest all the Mohs surgeries to get rid of the Cancer were pretty straight forward: "We will just cut out the bad parts."
This is the part of the journey that scares me.
I know it will be ok but, yeah I'm scared.
After the surgery this flap will stay there for about a month, I probably will turn into a vampire and only come out at night!
After a month I will have to come in every couple of weeks to get the new skin shaved off and trimmed so it starts looking like a nose.
When it's all done they say it will look great, but my nose will be lighter than the rest of my face so I will have to start wearing makeup and stuff to cover that up.
I think I’m going to go home for the weekend. I need to be around people and keep busy.