June 2, 2009 one week

It's been a week today.  The reminders are still painful but the swelling is almost gone and the healing has begun.  Some of the scars are already healed and tomorrow I'll go for a check up with the plastic surgeon.  Finally, the pain in my eye from whatever gouged my cornea is all but gone.  That only comes back with a sideways glance so I avoid those and just keep looking forward.

I still can barely see and that is troublesome.  I hope that improves soon as I need to be able to see to make beads and jewelry and I'm getting bored with just sitting.  I guess that is what drove me to start this blog.

Sunday May 31, day 6

It was also my birthday. Happy birthday to you, you look like a freak. Your face carved is like a roadmap and your spirit is so meak.

That's pretty much how I was feeling! I still felt the sharp pains in my eyeball, but the swelling in my face had gone down quite a lot over night.

What I wouldn't give for a do-over. I would have scheduled this thing for next week in order not to have to go out looking like this tonight! I had plans that included celebrating my birthday with friends at the Sunday Night Blues at LIVE Downtown Duluth and listening to the Deb Callahan Band, who were coming all the way from Pennsylvania to play for the Sunday Night Blues Crew!

I pretty much wanted to stay home but I had known Deb was coming for a few months and had been salivating the fun of hearing her again.

I spent some time styling my tresses so that the one side of my face was covered with a nice blonde swoop of hair. It's a good thing my bangs are down below my chin, so this was relatively easy. I had planned to wear the light colored sunglasses but the problem was, I still couldn't see, and it was dark in the club.

Once there I ended up having to share the ordeal with my peeps and once I got comfortable and had my face securely covered by my hair everything was alright, in a trauma induced state of mind kind of way.

There was a beautiful chocolate cake with roses to share with everyone, and the cutest frog garden ornament you ever did see! He is made of copper and is holding a glow in the dark blown glass ball. I'll have to post his picture. I passed cake out to the peeps at the club and the band during the break and stuck around for a couple of hours of good music. It's a good thing the music started at 6pm as I hightailed it out of there and home by 9 so as not to drive with my poor vision after dark.

I was glad I went out, I needed that bad...

Deb Callahan Band

http://www.debcallahanband.com/

Thanks to Deb and the band for coming back to freezing cold Duluth!  The weather sucked but you were beautiful!

Saturday, May 30th day 5.

After spending a miserable week I longed for the day when I would open my eyes in the morning and not have an icebag as an appendage.  

Friday was so awful I ended up laying flat again, holding the ice bag for dear life.  It was my eyeball now.  It felt like I had an eyelash or some foreign object in my eye but I couldn't see to find it.  I'd take a sterile gauze pad and wipe all around, hoping to catch what was floating in my eye causing so much discomfort and pain. 

By saturday morning the pain had progressed to the point I could no longer stand it so I went to the emergency room and they called in an eye specialist. 

"That's quite the scratch you have on your cornea, it's a gouge, actually".   

The numbing drops & stain that she put in my eye to look at it was a heavenly relief, only it didn't last long.

Pain pills and antibiotic eye ointment were perscribed and away I went, back to my ice bag where I stayed for the duration.  Evidently, since Friday was a very windy day, something was blown into my eye and with the area around it so swollen, it didn't blink correctly to stop whatever it was from lodging in there.

May 27, week one

 I was every bit as incapacitated as I was after my last hip replacement.   I couldn't see, which made it almost worse.  The swelling and bruising was horrendous.  If I took the ice bag off of my face for even a short time my eye would just swell closed.   I couldn't really even sit up because my face would throb.  I mostly had to remain horizontal holding on to a bag of ice.

And it looked like this...

The whole center of my face was swollen and sore, even on the other side of it all...as if that untouched side was in sympathy with the injured part.    I did not recognize the person in the mirror.  That is someone else, not me!  What a freekin nightmare.   The pain.  Oh the pain...

I was not oblivious anymore, my head had been firmly yanked from the sand.

May 26, 2009 repair surgery

It was great walking around that hour and some oblivious. This was a piece of cake so far, except for the painful injections and the jabbering woman.

Consult

I met with Dr. Glickstien and since i had two choices, he handed me a mirror.  I asked him "do I have to look"? and he said "yes, you do, so you can decide what to do"...

I was horrified.  I got sick to my stomach.  The corner of my eye was GONE!  The hole in the spot where I once had a nice little eye corner was now large enough and deep enough to insert my whole index finger up to the first knuckle!

Did I say I was sick?

THE CHOICES

I had two choices and had to choose one and neither one of them was very pretty.  Neither was I at this point but that's besides the point!

Choice A)>  Since it was too deep for a skin graft, I could leave the hole and let it grow to fill in for 3 or 4 months and THEN come back for a skin graft...

ChoiceB)>  Dr. Glickstien drew several lines near the hole.  One along the side of my nose, another towards the bridge of my nose, and a little slit under my eye.  The lines were where he would cut my skin, then use the loose skin to make flaps and things to build me a new eye corner and cover the hole that way. 

I asked how deep the cuts would be and the answer to that was, "as deep as the original wound".

I felt sick again, but the prospect of walking around with that giagantic hole in the corner of my eye for 3 or 4 months and then still having to go back to repair my face?  No thanks..."let's fix this thing and get it over with" was my answer!

The repair

I so wanted to be knocked out but this was not an option.  Instead, I received a series of painful nerve blocks and numbing injections that seemed to go on forever.  

I was wearing some kind of pad that grounded me for major cauterizing, much bigger than the little bit they did in the morning...oh the smell of burnig skin still lingers in the corner of my minds nose.

Following the numbing was the feeling of cutting and sewing.  I could feel wherever he was cutting and putting in stitches and it was all very uncomfortable but it didn't hurt at the time.   I was already dreading the next day as I was laying there but I wanted to get the hell out of there and it seemed to go on forever...

Finally he was finished, and he put a patch on my eye.  I remarked that it would be hard to adjust to see for driving home, and that was when he took the patch off and said "you're driving"?  "Yes", I said, and off came the patch and I was given one to put over my eye when I got home.

  Do I need to shout it to the rooftops that I was oblivious?  Why wouldn't I have driven myself even though I did have an offer of a ride?

The drive home sucked.  It was rush hour and I just wanted to get home before the numbing shots wore off.  Thankfully that did happen because it wasn't long before the pain set in.  

Before I applied the eye patch, I took a horrifying look at my face, and a picture.

  And then I went to bed with an ice bag.  All I wanted was for this nightmare of a day to end.

May 26, 2008 Mohs Surgery

I woke up that morning with my head still in the sand.  This might hurt a little, I thought, but the big deal I made of the shave biopsy made me feel so foolish that I wasn't going to go on like that again. Off to the clinic I went. 

Bring a book, they told me.   I could be there all day and there would be an hour wait in between procedures.  I packed a bead project.  It would be a perfect time to finish the beautiful bracelet I'm weaving. 

Before Dr. Lund got started we had a little chat where he gave me the option go to under general surgery in the hospital for this because of the sensitive location.  Then the removal and subsequent repair surgery could take place while I was under.   I started feeling a bit sick at that point but then he told me the option also came with a risk.  The risk would be that they don't always get all of the cancer that way, but with the Mohs they did.

Time to suck it up buttercup! Cowgirl Up!

I uttered the words "I'm here,let's just get this over with".

OUCH!

This was NOTHING like the shave biopsy!  What was I thinking doing this thing awake?

Countless injections of numbing agents were placed in various spots around the corner of my eye, my nose, and my eyelids.  Every one of them hurt.

I could hear the cutting, it sounded like fabric only it was my face.

I could smell burning skin when each section was cauterized.

I was sent to the waiting room.  I could not see very well.  I couldn't focus to bead, that idea was out the window.  I couldn't read either.  And in the waiting room was the jabberjaws from hell.  They seemed like very nice people, all in all but one thing I wasn't in the mood for was the  three other people in the room.  One was a male patient and he had two women with him.  The older of the two women was a real jabberjaw and it was all I could do to keep from asking her to please shut her pie hole.  It didn't help that the chairs were hard as boards and uncomfortable as hell and remind you, the wait was an hour to an hour and a half between each slice.

Each slice had painful injections of numbing.  The long acting six hour numbing lasted all of an hour. 

Three sessions of this and I was told they were finished.  It was noon, and I was told to come back at 1:30 to see the plastic surgeon.  I even saw a picture of it on the computer.  Mind you, I couldn't see so the picture didn't look so bad!  

I had a bandage and nothing hurt so I went by the grooming shop for a visit and lunch.

I was oblivious!

May 2009

The letter (in my previous entry below), was disturbing to say the least!  I had to digest.  I didn't pick up the phone that day, but waited until the next morning once I digested the information presented to me. When I called the office,  they made me an appointment for 3 days later...

Still, I told myself...I think everyone I know, knows someone who has had some skin cancer and everyone has said it is really nothing.   We are a naturally blonde haired blue eyed light skin pale bunch up in this part of the country and skin cancer runs rampant.  You go to the dermatologist and they scrape it off, right?

The short answer to that is...

NOT ALWAYS!

I had my appointment with Dr. Lund, who assured me that he could remove the cancerous tissue easily and that it was nothing to be real worried about.  That if a person is going to get a cancer, you would sign up for this as opposed to some of the others. 

The procedure he would do is called Moh's Surgery.  During this procedure they numb the area and shave off skin layers hourly,  until  they get a sample that is cancer free.   I was to be there at 8am, bright and early.  A plastic surgery trauma team would be scheduld to stand by that afternoon to do repairs if needed.

That was reassuring.   But boy did I ever have my head in the sand....

February/March 2009

The day finally arrived when I would do something about that little thing on my face I've been ignoring for so long.   I met the sweetest man in the world, I think.  His name is Dr. Bamford and he practices dermatology in the Duluth Clinic.  He said the site "looked suspicious" and would need a biopsy. 

I didn't go there prepared for any kind of procedure!  I just thought it would be to have a look and a discussion.  I couldn't go through with having the corner of my eye numbed by needles and a sample shaved from my skin!  I was given the option of coming back for that so that is what I did, two weeks later.

The biopsy

Two weeks later when I went in for the biopsy I was so nervous!  Not afraid of any outcome really,  but the thought of needles so close to my eye...in that sensitive area!  I so did not want to do this, I think at that point I would rather have another hip replacement than the needles near my eye!

The biopsy procedure, it turns out...was NOTHING!  Oh, I was so rolling my eyes at me for thinking myself into a big tizzy over the little thing that happened that I was embarrassed for myself!

That Dr. Bamford used the word "suspicious"  to me, meant it was probably nothing but we'll see to make sure.  Wrong again.

March 2009

This is what I recieved in the mail via registered mail, as the doctor office wasnot able to get ahold of me by phone.  I am rarely near my phone!

DIAGNOSIS:

Skin, inner corner of left eye, shave bsiopsy:  Carcinoma present, see comment.

COMMENT

The tumor appears to represent a squamous cell carcinoma.  The lesion extends to the deep and lateral margins of the biopsy.  A metaplastic basal cell carcinoma cannot be completely excluded.

Althought slowly growing, your lesion needs to be completely removed to aviod further damage to the eye and surrounding skin.

October 2008

During a routine office exam, my GP mentioned the thing growing near the corner of my eye and had his nurse make an appointment for me at a dermatologist in the Duluth Clinic. 

The earliest appointment available was in February of 2009 so I had a bit of a wait, but now the pressure was off to call the number on the card I was given a year ago.   

I finally had an appointment that was months away.  so of course...

I really wasn't thinking about it (much).

It the beginning I thought it was a small skin tag or really nothing...

I am admittedly very fond of the sun.  I haven't often been one to actually lay in the sun to get the glowing tan that so many caucasions crave, I did my sunning as an avid fan of the outdoors and activities such as boating, horseback riding,  and gardening.

Not to say I never laid in the sun.  I did do that as well, but really not that often as I was pretty much in to staying busy!   I also worked road construction for three summers and baked myself on the highway to the point of burning my face red daily.  I am mostly French Canadian and a sunburn on my body would happen but once a year in Spring.  

Skin cancer was not going to happen to me, it happend to light skinned people!

Timeline:December 2006

I noticed a small growth near the corner of my eye.  I thought it was a small skin tag or something unimportant.  In fact, after messing with it awhile I was actually able to remove most of it by pinching it off with my fingernails!

Walla, gone...or so I thought!

Timeline:June 2007

Then two years ago this month while I was getting a cortisone shot for my hip pain, the doctor told me I need to have the face thing looked at.  It was small.  So small I couldn't believe he even noticed it! I took his card with a referral to a dermatoligist and put it in my purse.

It wasn't that I didn't care about any of this or anything, but I never did anything about it.  It was summertime and I was very busy living life and planning a sailing trip and a hip replacement was looming in my near future.   It was always in the back of my mind, though.  Also in the back of my mind were the other words the doctor had said "it's common and nothing to get worked up about and easily removed"...and those were the words I concentrated on the most.

I wish I hadn't! 

Which leads me to why I am writing this to share with the world!  I hope that anyone who comes across this blog will take stock and check themselves, and most importantly, heed this advice: If you have any changes in your skin, please do get it checked and do follow up with the advice given by your doctor.   I'm lucky I did not lose an eye.