As promised, here's the post-skin removal pictures I mentioned last night. Once again, this is me reminding you that they aren't pretty. If you are made queasy by blood or anything of that nature, feel free to scroll on past to prior updates.
This is me the day after the nine-hour surgery to excise the loose skin I had amassed as a result of massive, rapid weightloss. Now that I think of it, I guess I forgot to mention that part before. Since I had so many procedures done at the same time, it was estimated that my surgery would last eight to nine hours. Luckily, it felt like just a few seconds to me -- yay anesthesia! I think my parents are the real motivators in this update, as I would probably kill someone if I had to sit in a hospital waitingroom for the better part of a day.
Spoilers: The only reasons for why I was feeling so "thumbs up" were Percocet and Dilaudid.
As it turns out, the stitching on one of my Jackson-Pratt drains (or blood satchels, depending on how badass we're trying to make them sound) was loose, so I was draining onto the bedsheets a bit.
These drains serve to remove fluid that can amass post-surgery. You know the clear stuff that comes to the surface of the skin when you cut yourself? It's called lymph. It serves, among other things, to help remove bacteria and other unwanted materials inside the body. Since my torso was essentially hacksawed, there's obviously going to be quite a bit more lymph than you see when you scrape your knee.
The fluid starts out a red color (the lymph is tinged with a bit of blood) and eventually turns to a clear/yellow color. They're annoying in that you frequently have to empty them, measure the output, and you aren't allowed to shower if you have them in. Yay for spongebathing like an old man! As of typing this, I have one drain left from the four I had in my initially -- and we've found a way to seal off the drain site so that I can shower. Just by putting one of those clear, skin-like patches over where the tubing enters my body, it creates enough of a seal that I can shower without worrying too very much about the risk of water getting in/around the drain site.
This one's actually a picture of one of the first times I was able to stand on my own post-surgery. The incisions were still very red and I had quite a bit of scabbing. I'm not exactly sure what that face is, but it's certainly something along the lines of "For the love of Christ, take the picture so I can lay back down."
Those neat little yellow things over my nipples are nipple dressings. While that sounds like a chance for an amazing sexual innuendo, they weren't anything fun or exciting. Basically, since I had the excess skin around my manboobs removed (gynecomastia), they have to remove your nipples. Let me say that again:
they have to remove your nipples. Once the manboobs are removed, they cut the nipples down in size so that they are more proportional to your bodysize and regraft them on.
The swelling around my sides that you'll notice is due to the liposuction. They're pretty aggressive with it, as my dad's friend said, "like they're vacuuming a car". It's gone down considerably since this picture was taken (a few days post-surgery) and should continue to go down quite a bit more.
Other than that, I'm looking pretty disheveled and homeless in this picture, but hey, you can't expect me to shave when I could hardly stand.
I've got one more update of things that have already happened that I will be posting after work today. Other than that, it's going to be "fresh content" updates [probably weekly or so, for a while at least] to document the healing process.
