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\u2019m not sure, and there was some hearing loss due to water in behind my ear drum. Well, that has all been fixed now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019ve dealt with praised him as a miracle worker and raved about what a great job he did on my nose. It\u2019s true, I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To explain what the \u201cfinger\u201d is, to the best of my ability, it\u2019s 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\u2019s supposed to do, but it\u2019s ugly as homemade sin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019m not sure if that involves another surgical procedure or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cfinger\u201d like the first one, but unlike Dr. Lee, he called it a flap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the way, Gabi has documented this whole thing with photographs, but we don\u2019t share them online because they are, well, somewhat shocking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n