Wednesday, May 25, 2016

[Trigger warning] surgery photos!

The post you've all been waiting for!

Warning level: EXTREMELY graphic. If you don't like blood, needles, sutures, or thinking about things touching eyeballs, do not click the Read more link.



This is a photo of a white square so that the preview of the first image below doesn't show up for mobile users. Yay for blogger being a pre-smartphone product...



So, you clicked! Yay!

[Educated guess] The fine needle aspiration biopsy of my tumor; the extracted material will be genetically tested to determine the likelihood of the cancer metastasizing, e.g., to my liver or lungs.

[Educated guess] These seem to be the sutures that held the plaque in place (see below).

The plaque itself! [Educated guess] On the other side you'd see the radioactive seeds.

This is the crazy-pants one...what layer of my eye is sewn shut here?!?!?!??!
UPDATE (6/13/2016): This is the conjunctiva! See the end of this post for a bit more detail.


My eyelids sewn shut around the plaque; after this, they taped a patch containing a lead shield to my face.

4 comments:

  1. Cool. So that plaque is bigger than I imagined. Could you feel the weight at all? Any idea how much it weighed?

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    1. I bet it was light; the weight was certainly something I felt, but wasn't the primary sensation that concerned me (it was more the tightness of stuff sewn shut on top of it and the discomfort of moving it, and by the end, a burning, painful sensation - probably the radiation!)

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    2. Also of note: I have lots of documentation about the plaque preparation; once I parse it enough to make some sense of it, I hope to be able to post some of it :)

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