Understanding

After waiting for almost 10 days and being given the impression that the insurance company had been dragging its feet, I decided to call to see if there was anything I could do.  The case manager, whom I had never spoken to before, was wonderful.  She got on the phone immediately and figured out the hold-up was actually in the hospital administration (not surprising, but it is a long story).  After working the phone, the fax and memos to the doctor (delivered in person) for a couple of days, the graft was approved Thursday afternoon, and the doctor immediately squeezed me into his Friday afternoon schedule.  The procedure took about an hour, and the graft will be checked Monday and Wednesday to see if it is taking hold as well as to determine what to do next.  The chemo schedule is also going to be dependent on the outcome.  The first five days are very critical.  However, there is nothing I can do besides having happy thoughts and prayers. The pain has reduced so much that I have not needed any pain medication since the graft was put in. Hopefully, that is a good sign.  (When the wound was filling in pain and bleeding were good signs because that meant viable tissues.)

Regardless of the outcome, the living cell graft is a modern bio-engineered wonder that enables people like me to avoid the risk of creating a second painful and hard-to-heal wound in the donor site.  Hopefully, I will be able report a good outcome in the next update.  

While I hope none of you will ever need as much medical care as I do now, I want to encourage you to keep on talking to all your doctors and nurses as much as possible if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.  Our health care system is very compartmentalized due to its highly specialized nature, and nobody knows everything.  None of my doctors realized that I had radiation necrosis when my wound refused to heal on its own and just told me to be patient.  By chance, we were talking to an old, and hence, experienced nurse who told us about the wound care center.  As soon as he reviewed me and my history, the wound care specialist knew immediately what we were dealing with and recommended the hyperbaric therapy which, if successful, prepares the wound for closing either by a flap or skin graft.  When there was a concern about whether that would potentially create a second wound, it was another nurse at the insurance company who mentioned an “artificial graft”.  I then went on the internet and found a bi-matrix “artificial skin” and gave the wound care doctor the literature. It turned out that my layperson’s discovery was not really appropriate for the condition I was in.  However, it got the doctor thinking about the possibility of a bio-engineered graft and, after some research, led to the recommendation of the graft I am using.  

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.