The Good, the Sad, and the Ugly

Friday, May 15th — Oh, good grief! I can’t believe it’s a month since I posted on my blog! And what a month it has been: I’ll have to summarize for you.

THE GOOD:

The Wound-Vac

Today was my final day with the Wound-Vac! And that’s very good. I really can hardly believe what a great job it did with my wound over the past six weeks or so. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I went to the clinic where Emily and her cohorts would remove the compression bandage and the special sponge, clean up the battle site where necessary (tweezers! MIST! water squirts! more tweezers! AAARRRGGH!), and cut a new sponge to size, to set me up for another couple of days. I could see progress almost every time. The sponge pieces were getting smaller; the floor of the pit was rising…

When the maggots departed, the wound site was about three inches by two and a half inches, with a couple of half-inch “peninsulas” sticking out one side. The peninsulas closed up first. With the granulation initiated by the Wound-Vac, their floor rose to surface level, and then the sides closed in and skin grew over the top. GONE!

Just a couple of weeks ago, the part that was still open was the size of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Last Monday, it was the size of a quarter. Today — the floor of the entire wound was at surface level, and in a couple of spots, there was even a little hypergranulation: the new tissue was a bit above the level. It was the perfect day to cease and desist with the machine.

I do want to note that my cats, Amy (29) and Chloe (10), had totally different reactions to the machine that apparently had become part of me. When I was in bed, I’d just lay it down beside me, where it would tick and slurp and sloosh away all night. Amy slept with me a few times, less than usual; and always at arm’s length from the Wound-Vac. She eyed it with definite suspicion. Chloe, on the other hand, seemed to love it. She’d position her fat little self so she could “play the piano” on my hip — that kneading motion of the front paws, in and out, back and forth, that kittens use when they’re nursing, and grown cats revisit in moments of happiness and sleepy comfort. And her side, or her backside, would be right up against the Wound-Vac! It occurred to me that she might have perceived its rhythmic ticking as a heartbeat, or maybe a purr. Anyway, she liked it. I saw more of Chloe as a roommate than I had for months, while the Wound-Vac lay on the bed.

Chiropractic and Yoga

Both of these were cut back drastically during the past six or seven weeks, alas. I’ve only just started up with yoga/physical therapy again once a week, instead of the usual twice. And I was only able to get to Seaside Chiropractic one single time per week, most weeks. But the amazing thing is, while I wasn’t noticing improvements per se with chiropractic, I began to understand why Dr. Klein keeps patients on once-a-week maintenance adjustments once they’ve pretty well reached their maximum level of improvement. If I missed a week, I really knew it the next week: everything was out of kilter, somehow. For a while, attached to the Wound-Vac, I had to get my adjustments in a sitting position, as when I first began at Seaside a year ago. The last couple of weeks I’ve been back on the moving table, having first disconnected myself from the machine for the few minutes an adjustment takes. Now that I’m Vac-less, I’m hoping to be able to go twice a week — if my visits to the clinic don’t have to be as frequent.

The Next Step: New Skin!

Here’s the best thing of all: next week, I’ll be getting (1) a Circ-Aid, an octopus-like creation of Velcro straps that wraps around the leg from knee to ankle and provides compression; and (2) NEW SKIN OVER THE WOUND!

The Circ-Aid will, I guess, be part of my life for a good long while. It appears that I have venous insufficiency, a condition where the veins in the leg are hypertensive, and have higher pressure than the arteries. This means that they can’t pump fluids back toward the heart efficiently. Blood and other fluids may pool in the lower leg and cause swelling, as well as degradation of the skin (leading to ulcers). But you never know: when I get back to my regular thrice-a-week schedule of chiropractic with David Klein, miracles may happen in the venous department. After all, he’s pulled off a few miracles for me already. I’m willing to give it a shot.

But the New Skin is something altogether amazing! Its website (www.apligraf.com) describes it like this: “Apligraf® is a unique, advanced biological skin repair therapy, and is created from biological ingredients found in healthy human skin. Which explains why it looks like a thin, circular piece of real skin.”  Although it doesn’t contain sweat glands, hair follicles, or blood vessels, it does have fresh cells, proteins, and nutrients to get the healing cycle going. No staples or sutures, either; they just lay it on the wound, put some SteriStrips along the edge, and let it sit there for a couple of weeks, under dressings and compression. It grows right into the person’s own skin and becomes part of it. Even more amazing: it has the property of repigmentation, which means that, over time, it will assume whatever color the rest of the person’s skin has! Isn’t that cool? I can’t wait to be part of this — or have it part of me.

THE SAD

My next-younger sister died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on April 29th, after living with cancer for nearly three years. She went into Hospice a couple of weeks earlier, and there was a sort of gathering-of-the-family to see her. I was not permitted to travel, given that I was still in the midst of the Wound-Vac treatment and needed to be at the clinic three times a week without fail to change the sponge. It wasn’t a good feeling, and it wasn’t easy to explain to her daughter and son why I wasn’t flying northward. Debby and I did have a good, brief conversation by phone a few days before she died, while she was still lucid.

I wish… I wish a lot of things, around this event. I wish I had been more loving to her, when we were children and teenagers. We were not always friends, throughout our lives; we were very, very different in our approach to life, and sometimes had small patience with each other. I wish I had been more understanding of her difficulties later in life. I wish she hadn’t been quite such a know-it-all about everything. And I wish she hadn’t allowed herself to be nasty and mean to our youngest sister, who went twice from Toronto to be with her. I kind of thought that a deathbed was your last chance to heal wounds and be loving to those you really love. Didn’t work that way, this time. It doesn’t matter now to Debby, but it sure does matter to Sally, who is left with that as her last memory of a sister she always truly loved and supported.

I think that’s plenty of Sad for now.

THE UGLY

Well, that would be me… at least, temporarily, I hope. Two weeks ago tonight I fell on my face; yup, flat-out on my face. I was wearing my glasses, so I ended up with huge glasses-shaped black bruises, as well as bruises on the side of my nose where the glasses’ little nose pieces went. Thank God I didn’t break my nose (although it bled like a waterfall, all over Robert’s mother’s favorite Oriental rug in the family room, alas); and thank God I didn’t break the Wound-Vac, which was, of course, slung over my shoulder. Hey, THAT would have been a disaster!

This was a fall that wouldn’t have happened, if I hadn’t lost some of my strength and some of my balance since the leg infection took over. Many times a day, in the real world, people stumble or trip minutely, and right themselves easily, without even thinking about it. I used to do that, too. Hopefully, I will again one day.

Meanwhile, I look like a raccoon. The black has faded to purple and lime-green, and has drained down from the eye area over my cheeks. An observer might suspect that the Beloved Spouse had been whacking me around, were it not that he himself had fallen out of bed a few nights earlier and broken a rib. Yes, it’s true. His side and my face were tastefully color-matched for quite a while. One of the physical therapists at the clinic whom I hadn’t seen for a week or so asked me last Monday if I had had a rhinoplasty (aka nose job). I said NO, quite indignantly. If I had, I would be extremely dissatisfied with the results; I’ve never been very fond of my nose.

THE END

Well, I guess that’s about enough for one evening. Hard to cover a whole month in a page or two! I hope you haven’t been bored to tears. For me, it’s been kind of a crazy month — lots of emotion, a fair bit of physical pain and discomfort, some really exciting developments. Thanks for reading about it — Betsy