The Reason I’m Seeing a Plastic Surgeon

I was looking through all of the pictures on my hard drive and I noticed a picture that I must have taken either late last year or early this year that I had forgotten about. It’s a picture of my stomach, meant to be a “before” picture. If you’ve been reading my blog, then you might know that I have an appointment with a plastic surgeon on May 8th.

I want to see a plastic surgeon in hopes that he/she can possibly reconstruct/fix the scar on my stomach. After having colostomy surgery, (to make a really long story super short) the staples that were being used to hold my wound closed after my first surgery were removed too early. This resulted in my wound opening up almost immediately after the staples were removed. In order for it to heal properly, it had to be packed with gauze everyday then bandaged. I’m happy that it healed and I didn’t get an infection, but I was left with another prize: a grotesque scar.

When I saw the picture I took, I figured: well, I must be in the mood to post grotesque pictures of myself today (note the picture of my severely broken out face from 2006 below). So, why not post this one now? My reason for taking the picture in the first place was so that I could compare it to how it would look if/when I have surgery to get it fixed.

Note the picture below. The scar on the right of the pic represents where my stoma was closed up. The scar right down the middle is where the staples were. As you can see, I no longer have a visible belly button. It’s in there somewhere…but because of the way my stomach healed, you can’t see it in this picture. When the wound first opened up and I looked at it, I thought that my entire belly button had torn too…..but it didn’t.

I guess we’ll have I’ll have to wait until at least May 8th so I can speak to the plastic surgeon. As I may have mentioned before, I was told that such a surgery might not be covered by OHIP. I can’t imagine WHY IT WOULDN’T, as this, in my books, was clearly a case of the staples being removed too early, especially taking into consideration that I’m on prednisone…. oh well…we’ll see and I’ll obviously post the results of my plastic surgery meeting after the date.