So, this is a graphic post, don’t click the pictures if you’re weak of stomach. About five weeks after my surgery I got a lamprey device to accelerate my healing. Supposedly it’s going to speed up my recuperation time by 75%. On Halloween the surgeon saw that I was retaining a lot of fluid up near my neck and it was getting a little infected, so he opened me up a bit and drained the fluid out and packed it with gauze. He asked Debbie if she thought she could repack it every day. She’d gagged audibly at the process and said she couldn’t, but she loves me so much she managed to do it almost every day since then. She’s pretty happy now that I have the vacuum and she’s done with playing Nurse Debbie. About the time I left for Reno the wound had opened up a little and looked like this. The pictures really don’t give a good idea of depth.
While I was at the conference, Brian helped pack it every other day, and he told me it seemed to be opening more. After getting back from Supercomputing Debbie was a little alarmed that several of the staples were hanging loose and it had opened even wider. Each time I went in to see the doctor and said that Debbie was nervous about the ever widening hole he told me she was doing a really nice job of packing it and it was healing up really well. The last time he recommended the wound-vac and it’s been sucking on my back for a couple days now.
I just tell people I’m a kool-aid machine.