Friday, October 3, 2014

Diary of a Crohn's Flare: Surgical Wound Debridement

From Wikipedia explains that Wound Debridement:

"... is the medical removal of dead, damaged, or infected tissue to improve the healing potential of the remaining healthy tissue."

As I mentioned in my earlier post about wound debridement, there are many different methods of debriding a wound.  From the same Wikipedia entry:

Removal may be surgical, mechanical, chemical, autolytic (self-digestion), and by maggot therapy, where certain species of live maggots selectively eat only necrotic tissue.

After looking at my wound earlier and also by monitoring the rate of wound closure (it was actually getting larger), my surgeon elected to perform surgical wound debridement and closed my wound with 3 sutures.  He performed this (minor out-patient) surgery on 9/17.  He cut out any questionable tissue (we don't think there was any infected tissue) and ensured that all that remained was the pink healthy tissue.

After waking up from the waking sedation (versed, fentanyl, and propofol administered by an anesthesiologist), I discovered that the debridement and wound closing caused my wound to sting REALLY badly.  On the first day after surgery I used almost the full amount pain medication written on my pain medication script.  However, the pain receded much faster from this than it did after my surgery on 8/11.  The difference in recovery times is easily explained by the difference in the involvement of the surgery.

Still I asked for and received a refill on my pain medication about 11 days after surgery.  Since then I've been working hard on reducing the amount of pain medication (Norco) that I required each day.


After this surgery (and the closing of my wound) my surgeon cancelled home health care.

Side note:
My surgeon ordered Home health care in order to monitor the progress of my wound.  However, my insurance only covered home health care as long as I was "home bound".  This meant I could not return to work, run, or really spend any time out of the house as long as I had an open wound in my belly.

This wasn't a problem because I felt truly terrible most of that time.  However, by closing my wound and ending home health care, he enabled me to return to work.

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