My Bout with Cancer – Part Eleven

The last time I updated this was January 6, 2024. I mentioned then that I was having problems with my eyes tearing and itching and not draining properly due to the cancer surgeon having to remove one of my tear ducts, or multiple tear ducts, I’m not sure, and there was some hearing loss due to water in behind my ear drum. Well, that has all been fixed now.

To explain more, I have to back up to the beginning and hope I get it right (old man memory coupled with a lot of stuff I didn’t fully understand in the first place). First, there was Dr. Kim, who operated on my nose at Swedish Hospital in Seattle. He got all the cancer out. Then came Dr. Lee, the plastic surgeon who rebuilt my nose. All the other doctors I’ve dealt with praised him as a miracle worker and raved about what a great job he did on my nose.  It’s true, I couldn’t tell my new nose from my old nose. He got it just right. There was some very slow healing, however, because he had to build what he called a finger made out of skin taken from the top of my head to feed blood to the skin graft on my nose to keep the tissue alive. That worked. For a while.

To explain what the “finger” is, to the best of my ability, it’s like skin rolled up into a cylinder like a finger or a little cigar and wrapped in medical tape and stitched into the skin between my eyebrows. It does the job it’s supposed to do, but it’s ugly as homemade sin.

To be sure they got rid of all the cancer, I had radiation treatments five days a week for six weeks. That was pure hell to go through, much worse on week six than week one.

I was left with the hearing and vision problems mentioned above. Dr. Lee said those could be fixed but suggested I see Dr. Woodman in Tacoma for that part because he was the best man for the job. 

Dr. Woodman first inserted a stent from where my tear duct would have been to drain into my nose to take the place of the tear duct. But that didn’t work. The inside of my nose was crusting and filling up the stent. So he took that out and replaced it with a glass tube called a Jones Tube. That has worked beautifully, but it will have to be cleaned out annually, and I’m not sure if that involves another surgical procedure or not.

Backing up again: the plastic surgery Dr. Lee did involved putting metal hardware inside my nose, screwed into the bone in my nose. That worked well at first, until the screw began poking out from the side of my nose because the radiation that they did to kill any last remnants of cancer also was slowly dissolving the living tissue that was covering the screw and other hardware.

So, on June 27, 2024, Dr. Woodman took out all the hardware and the part of bone that had become infected, put in a new graft on my nose, and built another “finger” like the first one, but unlike Dr. Lee, he called it a flap.

By the way, Gabi has documented this whole thing with photographs, but we don’t share them online because they are, well, somewhat shocking.

So we started all over with the ugly flap where the ugly finger had been, and I’ve lived with that since the end of June. It was so ugly and encrusted with dried blood, that I stayed inside for those early weeks and would not let anybody outside of the family see it. This past Wednesday they took the bandaging off the flap and removed the stitches in my forehead and nose, The flap is still there. It looks like a thumb resting between my eyebrows, but at least it’s not as ugly as it had been with all the bandaging. And I have an appointment for the twenty-fifth of this month to have it completely removed. That will require another surgery, hopefully my last. Time will tell. Or to quote Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, “So it goes.”