The good news and the bad news

We just arrived back home from a visit with the plastic surgeon. Things are still all set to go for surgery on Monday. Everyone is pleased with the amount of expansion we have been able to get, though they expanded the forehead today and I'll do another expansion in both places on Sunday. The surgery is expected to only take around 2 1/2 hours, which seems really fast to me. That's all the good news.

My private fantasies that this will be the only tissue expansion H. will need to go through are just that... fantasies. This time the surgeon will be able to correct the skin on her scalp and on most of her forehead, but there is still a lot of skin that will need to be replaced around her eye and down the side of her face along the hairline (between her eyebrow and ear). There is no way that the tissue gained from this time will stretch to cover those areas. This means that once she has healed from this surgery, we will get to go through the same process again, this time putting an expander under the skin on the other side of her forehead. With that new tissue the surgeon will then work downward. At least he is only talking about one expander for the next time. Sigh. One thing at a time.

Here is where she is at this point, with just one more expansion to go before surgery.


(The headband is going around her head at a place without expanders.)

Someone mentioned on a previous post that H. has gorgeous hair. She really does. It's thick and lovely. This is a really good thing, because when the surgeon removes the iffy skin, the new skin, hair follicles and all, will be stretched to cover it. Because she has such thick hair, this should be barely noticeable once it's all healed. As you can see, the expander is only vaguely noticeable because of the amount of hair she has.

The adventure continues...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making bias tape... otherwise known as the Sew, Mama, Sew! Giveaway

Apple picking in the rain

Kenzie on the beach