As I mentioned before, my incision line was not healing, and it was delaying my prosthesis surgery. I started seeing a plastic surgeon in combination with my treatment team in the hopes of getting my wound healed. My swabs and scans came back normal but it still wouldn’t heal. My doctors were trying different things that were the usual course of treatment for a wound like mine but for whatever reason it wouldn’t work. As they told me several times, I “don’t respond typically to treatment”. Not the response you want to hear from your doctors.
Eventually, they decided that maybe the skin was breaking down because the skin was dipping down over the area where there was no bone. That it might be worthwhile to move ahead with the surgery. Before they could I had to decide what material I wanted my prosthesis made out of.
My neurosurgeon, Dr. Spears, recommended that I go with a custom built medpor prosthesis from stryker. The prosthesis is built off of your CT scan so it wouldn’t need to be shaped in the OR. The prosthesis would need time to be built to my specifications and it was coming from the United States. I had some concerns about it coming from the States in case there were any delays at customs. I had heard that another hospital in Toronto also does this surgery so I was interested in meeting with a doctor there to learn more about it. Since this surgery would ideally be my last and the prosthesis would be in for the rest of my life, I wanted to make sure that I picked the right one.
Picking my Prosthesis
I had a referral made to meet the plastic surgeon who makes the prosthesis there. I was under the impression that they would be making the prosthesis out of the same material as medpor which is basically a form of plastic but this hospital actually uses metal. The prosthesis would be shaped while I was in the OR on the operating table. They went through the whole process with me, how the surgery would be conducted and what the prosthesis would be like. My hope had been that I would walk out of this appointment knowing exactly what prosthesis to go with. I honestly walked out of the appointment, went straight to the washroom and burst into tears.
Going with this prosthesis would mean that I would have my surgery at this hospital instead of the hospital where all of my previous surgeries had been conducted. It would also be conducted by a plastic surgeon, instead of a neurosurgeon, and a neurosurgeon would be available on-call if needed. This concerned me. If something went “wrong” they would have to call the doctor to come to the OR and what if they were in surgery? Or there was some other kind of delay? No thank you.
I went back to see my neurosurgeon and he explained more about how the surgery would be conducted there. The prosthesis would be made in advance and my neurosurgeon who had done my other three surgeries would be inserting it. Knowing that my surgery would be done by a neurosurgeon and that the prosthesis would not need to be adjusted in the OR put me at ease.
Making my decision came down to what matters most to me. Going with the plastic surgeon, he would do everything he could to make sure that the site looked the best it could. Going with a neurosurgeon, the focus would not be on the looks but more on putting in the prosthesis without affecting my brain.
For me, it was a no-brainer (pun not intended). I went with my neurosurgeon and the medpor prosthesis. I had lived with the bone out and the “dip” on the side of my head for over a year. Neither option would be able to completely fill in the side of my face where the jaw muscle had atrophied as a result of being cut so many times. What mattered to me was my brain and that it wouldn’t be damaged anymore than it already had been in the initial accident.
Once I had made my decision to go with the medpor prosthesis and Dr. Spears as my surgeon, I felt at peace. I was confident in my decision and I knew that I had made the right decision for me.
Thank you for reading,
Charlene xoxo