Post 19: Underarm Bulge

Just a detail clarification on something I mentioned earlier, about the bulge under my right arm.

Whilst this is filled with a little fluid, the plastic surgeons told me today that the area is enlarged at present due to this being the where the blood supply to my 'flap' was fed.

Here's right how they did it:

• Lump removed, plus a 3cm margin to catch all traces of the Sarcoma, but also to chop out the RT area.
• Skin and muscle was cut and removed from my lower back (or donor site) in the same shape required to fill the hole that was removed from my chest, to ultimately become the 'flap'.
• The blood supply from the donor site was opened up and posted through under my armpit and into my chest area and reconnected, to allow the flap to continue to be supplied with blood as before.
• Then, the wound on my back was then pulled together and stitched in an almost horizontal line across my back to seal me up.

Turns out the flap either lives or dies in the first 48 hours after surgery; the nurses were checking this *very frequently* during this time, to compare the temperature of the flap itself against my body temperature, but also that when depressed, the skin immediately goes yellow/white and then returns to the regular colour because of the blood feeding it.

If the flap were too have failed in the first 2 days, it would have gone cold, blue and then black, to which I'm guessing the fix would have been too dig out another section of skin and try all over again, but... so far so good.

So, I guess the update on the Jira ticket would be:

Flap.exe (version 1.0.0) was deployed to the production environment, with no critical issues during the 48hr super-mega hypercare phase. Will continue to minor for bugs, but currently the app itself and all dependencies are running as expected. Closing.

#sarcoma #flapsurgery #geekspeak #plasticsurgery #plasticsurgeryflaps