A few days after my appointment with the surgeon someone from his office called me to set up the surgery. It was scheduled for only one week later. The morning of the surgery I woke up in an incredibly good mood considering that just a few hours later I would be laying on an operating table. When I got to the hospital, I met with my surgeon who explained to me what his game plan was going to be. He was first going to get rid of all non-viable tissue, including a small portion of the bone. Then he was going to place antibiotic seeds inside the wound cavity. His entire plan up till that point was very familiar to me being that he had done all of that previously. He then explained, that he was going to use something called GraftJacket inside the wound. Then he hopefully would just be able to suture the edges together.
GraftJacket is made of human dermal (skin) tissue components. Its purpose is as a repair matrix that will then rapidly be converted to the patient's own tissue by quickly renewing blood, cellular and nutrient activity throughout the matrix. Over time, the tissue graft aids in the repair of the wound and is replaced by tissue like the patient's own. As he explained it to me it would ideally help to fill in the tunnel of my wound.
All of this sounded like it was a good plan and again I went into the operating room with no hesitation in the least. The surgery happened exactly as the surgeon had planned for it to go and approximately an hour later I was being wheeled into the recovery room, aware of everything that had gone on and having heard, that at least for the meantime the wound was sutured closed. I was at home feeling very well within just a couple hours of the end of the surgery. When I got home, I called my nurse, just like I had said I would do and told her what the surgeon had done and what the following visits wound care orders were. All the surgeon wanted done was for the dressing to be looked at and if it was still intact and clean that it was to be left alone. The nurse came two days after the surgery for all of five minutes, the dressing was clean and dry so she did not change it. That was totally fine with me, although it did end up being changed the next day because it had gotten soiled. When the nurse changed the dressing she said that it looked great and that everything seemed to be fine. I was so incredibly happy to hear that, yet I was still trying to remain only cautiously optimistic.
Six days after the surgery, I was back at my regular wound care appointment so that my surgeon could make sure that everything was healing nicely. He said that it looked great but that he wanted to leave the stitches in place for another week, just to give it more time. By then I didn't really care what he said had to be done or not be done, I was just incredibly glad that things seemed to be looking in such a positive direction.
Things were going really well and I was doing my best to stay off of the wound as much as possible, as a matter of fact I had only been up on it to ride home from the surgery itself and to go to and from that wound care appointment. That was actually harder to do than it had been in the past, just because I felt so incredibly well. I was determined that I was not going to sabotage the healing process so I did not get up unless it was absolutely necessary.
As sometimes happens, just as things seem to be going really well, WHAM you get smacked upside the head with a dose of reality. My reality came about twelve days post-op, when I woke up very early in the morning with this weird emotional 'something isn't right' feeling. While I was worried I already knew that my visiting nurse was going to be arriving at my house within a few hours. Before I had even fully explained to her how I thought things were going, she had taken off the dressing and was making an 'uhoh' sound. It turns out that the stitches were pulling and didn't seem to be holding the wound closed. To take a quote from Yogi Berra, 'this was like deja vu all over again'.
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