Wanna see something gross?
So, as you may have heard, I've got a hole in my stomach. It's healing, and according to the doctors and the nurse, it's healing fast and well. It's still open, and I'm still exhausted, but it IS getting better. I'm off the Wound Vac this week, and found out yesterday that's a forever thing (originally, they took me off of it because my skin OFFICIALLY freaked out because of the constant plastic covering and needed some time off). I've found a new and better doctor, a plastic surgeon that specializes in wounds in general and Wound Vac treatment in particular, and I finally feel like someone is in control.
All of that said, the healing process has been long and hard, and is still going on. I actually just realized that I haven't updated this since a few days after I got out of the hospital, and so you don't know that I've been back at work since my first week home, and been hooked up to the Wound Vac for the better part of the past month 24-7. A Wound Vac is a machine that creates a vacuum seal over a wound by putting a sponge in the wound itself and covers the whole thing with plastic, and then attaches a vacuum pump to the whole thing (this does a decent job of showing the thing at work - watch around the :40 mark to watch the vacuum kick in - it's pretty wacky). The machine itself (which I named Lizzy, after Lady Elizabeth Bathory) fits in a little pack that I carry with me all of the time, makes occasional slurping noises in public that are incredibly embarrassing, and has meant that I've been tethered to a small box all of the time for awhile now. Being free of it this week is AWESOME.
However, most people that I deal with daily work under the assumption (a somewhat understandable one) that since I've been out of the hospital for about a month now, I should be "better" and "fine" - which is not at all the case. During this whole time, I've been struggling with doing a tremendous amount of healing, which has been taking a TON out of me, and while I'm no longer hospitalized, I've been very much handicapped. I went back to work right away, because, like, I had to and stuff, but I wasn't at all ready to, and I've been paying for that. Further, as I say, the trauma was and has been still going on (which has been healing the VERY big hole, rather than surviving the infection and the surgery), and as such I've been exhausted pretty much all of the time. The only way I can ever seem to get anyone to understand the full magnitude of what I've been dealing with is to show them pictures of what's been happening, as just talking about just doesn't seem to do the trick. For some reason, this validates me and my struggle enormously, and as such, I'm going to do the same here, although I totally and completely understand if you don't want to click on the link below.
Now, I warn you, the photos below are really, really graphic. I mean, REALLY graphic. The first 5 show what the wound looked like when I first came home from the hospital, when I was doing my own wound care, before the vac, and when I had to pack it with gauze MYSELF. It is totally and utterly gross. The last photo is to show how kinda cool the human body is, as it shows what it looked like about 10 days ago, so you can see how much healing has happened in less than a month. It is even more healed now, but I don't have pictures of it at the moment.
Wicked NSFW, but not in a sexy way.
I know this is the very definition of TMI, but, as I say, showing the pictures has been the only way I feel my struggle over the past 6 weeks has any resonance with anyone else. And, because I'm weak, I need it to have resonance - this has been a hard row to hoe on my own.
All of that said, the healing process has been long and hard, and is still going on. I actually just realized that I haven't updated this since a few days after I got out of the hospital, and so you don't know that I've been back at work since my first week home, and been hooked up to the Wound Vac for the better part of the past month 24-7. A Wound Vac is a machine that creates a vacuum seal over a wound by putting a sponge in the wound itself and covers the whole thing with plastic, and then attaches a vacuum pump to the whole thing (this does a decent job of showing the thing at work - watch around the :40 mark to watch the vacuum kick in - it's pretty wacky). The machine itself (which I named Lizzy, after Lady Elizabeth Bathory) fits in a little pack that I carry with me all of the time, makes occasional slurping noises in public that are incredibly embarrassing, and has meant that I've been tethered to a small box all of the time for awhile now. Being free of it this week is AWESOME.
However, most people that I deal with daily work under the assumption (a somewhat understandable one) that since I've been out of the hospital for about a month now, I should be "better" and "fine" - which is not at all the case. During this whole time, I've been struggling with doing a tremendous amount of healing, which has been taking a TON out of me, and while I'm no longer hospitalized, I've been very much handicapped. I went back to work right away, because, like, I had to and stuff, but I wasn't at all ready to, and I've been paying for that. Further, as I say, the trauma was and has been still going on (which has been healing the VERY big hole, rather than surviving the infection and the surgery), and as such I've been exhausted pretty much all of the time. The only way I can ever seem to get anyone to understand the full magnitude of what I've been dealing with is to show them pictures of what's been happening, as just talking about just doesn't seem to do the trick. For some reason, this validates me and my struggle enormously, and as such, I'm going to do the same here, although I totally and completely understand if you don't want to click on the link below.
Now, I warn you, the photos below are really, really graphic. I mean, REALLY graphic. The first 5 show what the wound looked like when I first came home from the hospital, when I was doing my own wound care, before the vac, and when I had to pack it with gauze MYSELF. It is totally and utterly gross. The last photo is to show how kinda cool the human body is, as it shows what it looked like about 10 days ago, so you can see how much healing has happened in less than a month. It is even more healed now, but I don't have pictures of it at the moment.
Wicked NSFW, but not in a sexy way.
I know this is the very definition of TMI, but, as I say, showing the pictures has been the only way I feel my struggle over the past 6 weeks has any resonance with anyone else. And, because I'm weak, I need it to have resonance - this has been a hard row to hoe on my own.