Have you questioned why he's interviewing someone from a Devon hospital? Archived Message
Posted by Laurie on August 27, 2020, 9:26 am, in reply to "Re: Have you questioned why he's interviewing someone from a Devon hospital?"
Thanks pete-g for your kind words. I was going about my business like any other TLN-er would be – and got crushed by a horse! No bones broken, but quite a large area of skin on my calf got ripped. First lot of surgery was to clear up the area. Then I had a blood transfusion. This sounds very dramatic, but it was just a bag of blood - used because my hemoglobin levels were low and because I had lost quite a lot of blood. Then I had the skin graft surgery. The anaesthetic was injected into my spine – so I was conscious throughout, and able to see what was going on. So they used the donor area (on my my thigh) to transplant skin to my calf (an area 11” x 4.5”). You can imagine that it was pretty strange watching all this! Especially when it went wrong! There was a machine malfunction. The machine skims off layers of skin, clearly at an exact depth. But the machine dug down lower than it should have done. The surgeon took it out. Tried again, but the same thing happened. So they found another machine. It already had a blade in it, which it apparently shouldn't have. So they found a third machine. This one worked – thankfully! It means that the level is uneven. They had to stitch the different layers together – which will mean that this will leave a scar. The surgeon will be taking this up with the company that made the machine - Zimmer Biomet. He said he will keep me up to date with this. It all sounds very gruesome. In fact later on I started thinking about Franz Kafka's In the Penal Settlement! Atm I have a tube attached to the grafted area, which leads to a machine which is a bit like a miniature vacuum cleaner (to draw out excess fluids). So not very mobile. The horse is doing well!
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