Staples

Posted by Roie R. Black on Mon 18 January 2016

Today is day six after surgery. I had another eventful night, visiting with nurses, checking email, watching TV. Wait! That was from 2AM-7AM. Sleep? Naw! We don't need no stinking sleep!

I am actually getting into this nighttime routine. The clock moves in mysterious ways in the middle of the night, so it seems a lot longer than normal, and I seem to get a lot done. I will pop awake, realizing that I fell asleep, then be good for a couple of hours. Nurses come in and steal "vitals". Occasionally, they steal blood, but that is not going on much now. Every once in a while they stick a needle into me in some weird place (like my stomach) to put something in.

It is a strange life.

But it is a good life! I am not in much pain, and seem to be getting better every hour!

Staples

At least I was, until I found out about staples!

Remember when Super Glue was invented? It was originally a replacement for sewing surgical cuts back together. The idea was to glue the skin back together so it would heal with less scarring. They still do some of that, I suppose. However, today I discovered that they also use a staple gun to do something similar.

Leg Surgery

Dr. Yu's team looked closely at my right leg during surgery, and decided that the blood vessels available on that side were not as good as those on the left. So they elected to cut bone fragments, skin and blood vessels from my left leg to rebuild my jaw.

When they got done "borrowing" that material (yeah, right! They plan on putting it back later? I doubt it!), they pulled the skin together and used a staple gun to hold things together. I lost count, but I suspect about a dozen staples were involved in this!

Today, they unwrapped my left leg to see how it is doing, cleaned it up and wrapped it back up. And pulled out each and every one of those nasty staples!

Pulling Staples

Staples are made of metal, right? And metal is hard to bend, right? So how do you remove them?

Well, you take something that looks like pliers, and PULL.

YYYYYOUUUUCCCHHH!

Each time the doctor pulled one out, it hurt! Not a little, but a lot. Good thing I had pain medicine about an hour before this all started

The doctor kept saying:

"Shoot, there is another one" I would steel myself for the pain, and he would pull out another one. It took centuries to get them out!

(Ok, so it felt like centuries!)

Looks Good!

The leg looked fine. The material they "borrowed" does not make much of a difference in the look of the leg. The bone fragments were screwed onto a titanium plate which will become part of my jaw as the bone grows back into a single piece. Dr. Yu said I would still be able to get through a metal detector, but I might need to deal with that.

A small price to pay, I suppose!

Neck Review

After the staple removal was done (yeah!) a visit from Head and Neck completed the morning. This time the focus was on the trache tube. They plan on capping the tube so I breathe normally today. If so, the trache tube is not needed anymore. We are hoping they remove if before they release me from the hospital, so this is a move in the right direction.

All in all, everything seems to be healing fine. Pain is under control, and they are talking about getting me out of here. What more could I ask for?

Well, as usual, more prayers would be appreciated. Cheryl is excited about getting back home, and it looks like that will happen soon.

In the meantime, I need a nap! These days plod along so slowly. I can hardly wait for night!

Comments


There are no comments yet.

Add a Comment

You can use the Markdown syntax to format your comment.