A tale of two healings

Though I haven't yet blogged about it, my first decompression surgery was a sucky horrible fail. I will tell the full story one of these days, when I'm not still hanging with my buds, valium and oxycontin. Cause Katie no write so good on those.

But I want to talk a little bit about the healing differences between the two surgeries, because they are already so apparent. One of the worst parts about the aftermath of my first surgery was that I dealt with infection, rejection of sutures, and wound dehiscence for not one...not two...but SEVEN months. One of the other sucky parts is that my surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic was just completely neglectful in treating this deep-seeded infection and I had to deal with it for so long, which was just shitty and borderline traumatic. Just when I thought it was healed (I'm talking MONTHS post-op), it would break open again, my lymph nodes would swell, and I'd spit another so-called "dissolvable" suture. And do another course of antibiotics. My GP was so angry for me. Since my Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon was always epically unavailable, my GP was frequently left trying to treat me and this gaping wound that led straight to my brain. It was a mess.I had my surgery in May '11, and in January '12, I was still dealing with that crap.

This was my incision two weeks after my first decompression (you can, as always, click to enlarge - but do you really want to?):

And this is my incision two weeks after my second decompression (taken yesterday):

Are we seeing the difference here?

I even had (and got on top of) an infection in my current incision. And it still looks this awesome. It took months and months for my first incision to look this good. My current surgeon's office is HOURS away, at OSU, and they called to make sure I was getting treated with the appropriate antibiotic. And when I accidentally told them the wrong dosage I was taking, they called me back to make sure I was mistaken about the dosage (I was) because I should be on a higher dose to clear it up fast and totally.

It's really too early to tell if this decompression is going to be successful. But so far, I could cry with happiness that my incision is actually healing. It's CLOSED. It's not opening or spitting nasty pieces of nylon. This gives me a lot of hope that maybe the internal healing will be similarly great. And maybe I'll dare to hope that I'll get better and ditch some Chiari symptoms, even though that's not the "official" goal of this surgery.

It also makes me all the angrier at my first surgeon, and at the Cleveland Clinic as a whole. I'm trying not to focus on that right now. I'm kind of over feeling pissed at them. For now, I'm gonna focus on being happy with OSU, and happy to have a surgeon who cares....not only who cares, but who writes me emails, from his iPhone, signed with his first name.