One more (final?) surgery . . .

On Thursday, Bill and I went to meet with a plastic surgeon, Dr. Blair (John) Summit at Vanderbilt Medical Center to see about the skin graft surgery I would need to heal my abdominal wound from my February surgeries. It had been a long wait, and I was apprehensive about a lot of miscellaneous aspects. Had he done many wound surgeries? Would he be appalled by the size of my wound? Would he just as soon Dr. Herline had never referred me?

I began to feel better when his (male) nurse settled us into the examining room and told us that Dr. Summit did a lot of wounds and was a "surgeon's surgeon." I could live with that! He didn't just do tummy tucks for tony West Nashville matrons and "breast enhancements" for their daughter's eighteenth birthdays.

The outcome of our meeting is that we would not have to do a skin graft, but we would be able to remove the top of the wound area and pull over the skin and tissue underneath and stitch it up with self-dissolving stitches. He would have to leave a drain in each side (I hate drains, but you don't get everything) which will stay in for about a week. He said he didn't expect that it would be very painful (hmmm?), and, best of all, it can be done as an outpatient procedure at the Nashville Surgery Center - April 9 at 9:30 a.m. General anesthesia (boo, hiss). I could probably write a book based on the hallucinations I had from my past 4 surgeries. One of the last ones was a bit embarrassing because I told the chief resident (my nemesis) that my nurse had committed suicide the previous night. To make matters worse, I guess after my first surgery that round they had me on dilaudid (instead of morphine or demerol) and I had a bad reaction to it - i.e. not coming round and talking without making a lot of sense for more than a day. Well, what the Sam Hill was wrong with good ol' morphine which I had had previously with no problems?

OK, I'm admittedly getting off the topic here. I very much liked Dr. Summit. I also used the opportunity to ask him about the chronic pain I have been in since my lower chin procedure in May 2004. It has been daily (hence, chronic) nerve pain (neuralgia) from the occipital area of the back of my head around my ears and under my chin; sometimes going up the front of my face on the edges up to my eyebrows. At times it has been severe enough to bring me to tears; it has been life-altering. It has been worse than the pain of my abdominal incision. In the last year, however, it has been helped by the new drug, Lyrica, introduced to me by my wonderful pain doctor, Jay Sun (he's Chinese). The worst thing about chronic pain, I always say, is that it's so chronic.

Again, back to Dr. Summit. I briefly described what had happened and asked him if he had ever heard of this happening to anyone else (I've had a hard time finding that to be true) and he said no, he hadn't. However, taking Lyrica and the tricyclics was the correct thing to be doing. He said it could be a neuroma around the trigeminal nerve. Guess what? I'm a member of and get the newsletter of the trigeminal neuralgia assoc. because they deal with all kinds of face pain.

But, I am hoping that this unfortunate chapter in my personal book on Crohn's will soon be closed, and we can just go back to a careful diet and being conscious of where every bathroom in the world is! Maybe the new Acura's navigation system will help with that!

P.S. I asked for a little liposuction while we were doing the surgery, but that flag didn't fly. :-(