Recovering

I'm slowly recovering. Today I ventured to Mass. We chose the MD Anderson chapel. I was unable to kneel due to the tightness of my entire front, but otherwise all was as it should be. I noticed that I was quite limited with my singing as well. Again I think that's due to the tightness of my front.

I'm trying to be kind of circumspect about the descriptions of my surgery and incisions. However, without trying to be graphic, I'm going to describe one of the incisions I have. My most limiting incision is on my abdomen. The line starts on my right hip. Not the front, though, as I expected, but instead on the back. I have a couple of blue stitches there. The line continues all the way down into my bikini line and around to the back of my left hip. At first description that doesn't sound too bad. I mean a straight incision isn't that big of a deal. However, this incision is actually only a small portion of my trouble. Prior to surgery the surgeon made a very large football-shaped mark on me. This was the harvest area. Basically, the surgeon cut this large football-shape out -- skin and underlying fat. The football-shaped skin that was removed is probably in a biohazard bucket somewhere. I didn't end up needing the skin the be transplanted with the fat. He then folded me in half and stitched the edges back together. The loss of skin is why he had to fold me in half -- I no longer have enough to easily reach across the hole he created. Thankfully, human skin -- especially abdominal skin on a woman -- is quite resilient & stretchy. However, in most instances, skin only needs to stretch a small amount at a time. However, since the crater he created was about 5" at it's widest, my skin is stretching quite far quite fast. To reduce the strain and pain of this stretching, I must walk, stand, sit, & even lay curved into a slight C-shape. Both the stretching & curving cause significant pain, however, as time goes on, my abdomen will eventually look, feel, & behave as it did before.

The drawing below is a representation of my abdomen. The pink dashed lines represent the drawing the surgeon did prior to surgery. The red line is the current incision I have on my abdomen. Incidentally, the belly-button in the drawing & in real life stayed in place, but was cut around and threaded through the stretched skin.