My experience with skin cancer, part 4: the month after surgery

Catch up on part 1 here.

Catch up on part 2 here.

Catch up on part 3 here.

Attending L's concert was a confidence boost for sure.  In the next few days after that the dizzy spells stopped happening and pain levels decreased to practically zero.  On Monday, five days after my surgery, I attempted to wash my hair in the sink and was successful!  With clean hair and a sponge-bath for the rest of my body, that was the first day that I started feeling like a real human being again.

Mirror selfie of my cleanliness!

I have Mondays off from teaching this year, so my first day back to work was that Tuesday, almost a week after the surgery.  The toughest part that week was explaining the bandage on my face to my students.  I decided to tell them the simple truth, that I had had skin cancer on my face, that it was all gone now and I was going to be okay, but that I needed to wear a bandage for another week.  Almost all of them were wonderfully sweet and understanding, and so helpful when I said that I couldn't bend much or lift things.  I was touched by their kindness!

On Wednesday of that week I decided to try taking a bath in the tub (without submerging my face of course).  It worked really well to get everything clean that way and I was just really careful to keep my face out of the water and avoid letting my wet hair drip down on my face.  That was another victory; it felt so good to have a way to get really clean!  I started taking baths every other day after that.

I got tired easily that first week back to work, and I found that by the end of each day I had a mild headache and face-ache, but I survived.  I canceled some after-school lessons and activities so that I could rest as much as possible.  I celebrated when I got to the end of the week-- Thursdays and Fridays tend to be my busiest teaching days, at my biggest school, with six classes in a row of 20-30 students and almost no breaks.  I knew that once I got through Friday, I would have easier teaching days the next Tuesday and Wednesday, and then my appointment to have stitches removed was after school on Wednesday!  I was looking forward to it.

Friday night, nine days after surgery, I took a nice long bath and had my first post-surgery glass of wine to celebrate making it through the week.  The post-op instructions had said no alcohol for a week following the surgery, and it had been nine days, so I figured I was safe.

Although to be honest, I was questioning everything I was doing at that point.  I was feeling better and mostly optimistic, but there was always the underlying stress of worrying that I was doing something to disrupt the healing process.  I had read (over Google, of course, usually a mistake) that skin grafts can fail if not properly cared for.  Meaning, the new skin on my nose could fail to "take" and would die and dry up and fall off and I would still be left with a big hole in my nose even after all this pain and trouble.  And so I made it through that second week after surgery on eggshells.  Being back to work, it was pretty impossible for me to completely avoid activities that got my heart rate up.  But every time I moved chairs and music stands around my classroom or went up and down a flight of stairs or raced to the teachers lounge to make copies during a free period, I worried that I was ruining all of my progress towards healing.  And yes I enjoyed some wine that Friday night but it was a smaller glass than I might usually have and it tasted slightly of worry and stress.  I knew I wouldn't be able to fully relax until they took of the bandage the next week and revealed whether my nose was healing successfully or not.

The night before my two-week follow up appointment, I found myself wanting to prepare for how the wound might look.  I think before I experienced the actual surgery and the beginning of the healing process, I assumed that once the bandage was removed I would look relatively normal.  I could sense now, even without being able to look under my bandage, that it would definitely not be fully healed.  And so, back to Dr. Google I went, but this time I found my searching helpful.  I looked up some pictures of Mohs surgery patients with skin grafts two weeks, one month, two months, and six months after surgery.  It was helpful to see those progress photos, and I was somewhat reassured that even if things still looked a little rough the next day, it wasn't anything to worry about in the long term.  It was good to re-align my expectations with reality-- I went to sleep that night feeling ready for whatever might be revealed underneath the bandage.

I taught school that Wednesday and then after school drove straight to the doctor's office for my appointment.  I arrived a few minutes early and there was a Starbucks nextdoor so... of course I treated myself in celebration.  Also took a few last selfies of my nasty two-week-old bandage.

I finished up my drink and went in to the dermatologist's office.  One of the surgeon's assistants (the same one who had bandaged me after the skin graft procedure) was there to remove the bandage and take out my stitches.  I expected some pain as he did this but I really didn't feel any discomfort at all, just some tugging.  I waited, sort of holding my breath, as he silently did his work, and when he finally announced, "The stitches are out!  It looks really good!" I let out a big exhale of relief.  I hadn't ruined anything by going up the stairs too many times!!!!

His only instructions that day were that I should keep the nose wound covered in Vaseline and then use either a band-aid or cut a small piece of non-stick gauze and use medical tape to cover it.  He didn't say how long I was supposed to keep it covered (two more weeks? eight weeks? a year?), which led to a bit of confusion for me later, but that day I was just so relieved that my skin graft had "taken" that I didn't think to ask many questions.  The surgeon stopped by really quickly and commented on how good things looked and took a picture of my nose for my chart.  Then they gave me a swipe of Vaseline and a fresh bandage for the road, and scheduled an appointment for me to come back and have everything checked in eight weeks.

For my next and final post in this series, I'm going to post some pictures of my nose and the healing process two weeks out, three weeks out, and so on.  If you're not into seeing pictures of wounds you may want to skip over this next one!  The only reason I'm sharing the pictures is that it was helpful and reassuring for me to see them, as a person going through this process.  Currently I am just about five weeks post-surgery and I have been absolutely amazed at my body's ability to heal both my nose and my ear, and watching the process and comparing pictures has been humbling and awe-inspiring and has made me feel so thankful.  It has inspired a lot of trust in the human body and nature, as well as the amazing doctors who helped me.  I look back on those first two weeks of worry and stress that I would do something "wrong" and I know that, while it was probably normal and a necessary part of the mental health journey for me, most of that worrying was for nothing.  I hope those words are encouraging to anyone who may be reading this and facing a similar procedure.

Stay tuned for healing pictures, if you want to see them!