I was scheduled for surgery last Monday to close my wound and get off the vacuum. It didn't happen. We waited too long, and I healed faster than they expected (nice, for a change), and now the thing is the wrong configuration to close neatly. It was about 16 cm long, 5 cm wide, and 5 cm deep, with a major "undermining" - another 40 square cm (sort of between my navel and my ribcage) where internal tissue was sandwiched together as it should be, but hadn't actually grown together and showed no signs of doing so. Now the undermining has grown together, and the wound is 14x4x1 cm. Big progress. But now, because the depth has filled in so much, he'd basically have to recut that undermining and install a drain again to close it, which really feels like a giant step backward.
So I'm still on the vacuum. There's one retention suture from the original surgery that is still visible at the bottom of the hole. The bad spots are all gone, all the tissue is healthy, but new tissue doesn't like to grow over a foreign object, so there's no telling how long this will take. The nurse could still see it when it was open a couple of hours ago. It could be done by Saturday, or it could take three more weeks.
In the last couple of weeks I've been able to get off the opiates on most days we don't change the dressing out (so TThSS). We also figured out that we can reduce the pain on dressing change days by cutting off the machine (literally, scissors to tubing) about an hour before the nurse is scheduled to get here, mixing some lidocaine gel with saline solution, and injecting it (with a syringe for pressure, but no needle) into the tubing and soaking the sponge with it. This doesn't kill the pain entirely, but it takes it from a me-screaming-and-crying 10 on the pain scale down to about a 3 (with percocet). So now I'm stoned for a few hours in the middle of the day MWF and otherwise just taking Alleve. I still feel it all the time, but the balance of pain against having my brain back most of the time has tipped. I had a pretty miserable weekend the first time I cut it off -super twitchy and couldn't sleep at all, and there's still a bit of that happening on the off days, but it's better overall.
Before all the cancer stuff happened I pretty much worked from home full time. I checked with my manager and he's cool with being flexible around my dressing changes, so I've decided to go back to work on Monday. I'll be working some funky hours for a few weeks while this finishes, but I'm really happy to be able to get back into it.
So I'm still on the vacuum. There's one retention suture from the original surgery that is still visible at the bottom of the hole. The bad spots are all gone, all the tissue is healthy, but new tissue doesn't like to grow over a foreign object, so there's no telling how long this will take. The nurse could still see it when it was open a couple of hours ago. It could be done by Saturday, or it could take three more weeks.
In the last couple of weeks I've been able to get off the opiates on most days we don't change the dressing out (so TThSS). We also figured out that we can reduce the pain on dressing change days by cutting off the machine (literally, scissors to tubing) about an hour before the nurse is scheduled to get here, mixing some lidocaine gel with saline solution, and injecting it (with a syringe for pressure, but no needle) into the tubing and soaking the sponge with it. This doesn't kill the pain entirely, but it takes it from a me-screaming-and-crying 10 on the pain scale down to about a 3 (with percocet). So now I'm stoned for a few hours in the middle of the day MWF and otherwise just taking Alleve. I still feel it all the time, but the balance of pain against having my brain back most of the time has tipped. I had a pretty miserable weekend the first time I cut it off -super twitchy and couldn't sleep at all, and there's still a bit of that happening on the off days, but it's better overall.
Before all the cancer stuff happened I pretty much worked from home full time. I checked with my manager and he's cool with being flexible around my dressing changes, so I've decided to go back to work on Monday. I'll be working some funky hours for a few weeks while this finishes, but I'm really happy to be able to get back into it.
