miata2fast

iTrader: (2)

Damn, hate to hear that.

You must not be hitting the pain meds too hard. Your typing is still pretty good.

Hope it goes ok, and you are back in the game soon.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

No pain meds right now, not even ibuprofen.

thenuge26

iTrader: (2)

Good Guy Mark

Is taking tons of painkillers

Still types better than Faeflora


Edit: dammit you ruined my joke.

delturcious

iTrader: (4)

The scalp option isn't fun. Worst migraine EVER, and the super drugs couldn't touch it. I think I win on total # of staples.
(This is what happens when you get turned into a pancake by an F-150)

rleete

iTrader: (21)

Zipper head!

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

What happened with your hair? The doc mentioned that the hair follicles along the incision sometimes stop working. This would suck as I usually buzz my head with a #0 guard. Would really hate if I had to grow out my hair to cover it.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Sorry to hear that, Mark. The good news is it doesn't look like you were very handsome to start with, so you don't have much to worry about.

delturcious

iTrader: (4)

It all came back... eventually. I don't remember exactly how long it took to need a haircut there, but at 6 months it was definitely normal though. There's still a ridge in a couple places, but you wouldn't notice unless you were giving me a noogie.

The weird thing was that there's a nerve that runs down your forehead to right above your eye. My left one tingled constantly, and it went absolutely berserk if I was hungry. Not pain; it was just THERE. That lasted 9 months maybe?

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Mine is usually done with a 2.5 or 3 guard and you can still see it but who cares? I get to tell people about it when they ask and we can have a conversation about cool scars, surgeries, and injuries. Experiences are what make life interesting, and the stories can be fun to share. A scar means something happened to you and people will want to know what it was.

Delturcious could make up a good bar story about being held captive by a deranged scientist of some sort who conducted experiments on him for weeks before releasing him. And since then he wakes up sometimes from blackouts always in the same area of woods with blood and wood splinters on his hands every time. And it isn't his blood.

matthewdesigns

iTrader: (8)

Mark, a friend of mine had a similar crushing injury in a mountainbike accident about 10 years ago, when his face met with a particularly sharp protruding rock. He has the Ti mesh material in his cheek and eye, and had I not been told he was in the accident I would have never known.

Best of luck for a speedy, painless recovery.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

So I don't even get a chuckle for talking crap about the injured guy's looks for no good reason...

I am fail.

m2cupcar

iTrader: (5)

I've done a bunch of sales/instructional videos for a cranio-implant manufacturer and always wondered who the people were with heads hanging open in these videos.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Huh- I didn't realize that they did that anymore. Don't the newer systems just use a plastic faceplate for coarse alignment, and then steer the beam in realtime based on fluoroscopic position-tracking?

Was your treatment with one of the cobalt-based devices like gamma knife, or was it an accelerator-based system?

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Nobody laughed because even if I come out of this with only 86% of my previous level of comeliness, I'll still be better looking than all of you gays.


Anyway, the surgery has been moved up to Tuesday afternoon. The latest CT scan revealed more damage so the brow incision has been ruled out -- I'll be getting the big zipperhead scalp incision. Yay.

Mark your calendars, you should be getting some painkiller-influenced funny posts from me sometime Wednesday of next week.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

They said Gamma Knife was old hat and that this was much more precise, whatever it was. They damn sure didn't want me wiggling.

I had it done at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. They had just gone through some big stink about calibration of the machine and the doc whose machine it was assured me it was the most double checked device of it's kind in the world that month. I guess somebody had gotten in trouble for something not being setup right.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Gamma knife is extremely old hat- 60s tech. Still in use, though. Most reliable radiotherapy device ever created.

I was just curious, as I thought that most (all?) accelerator-based system were flouroscopically aligned in real time. Admittedly, I'm not a medical physicist, just an avid reader.

I gotta tell you, though- Linacs scare the hell out of me. One of my jobs involves software reliability testing, and one of the most famous case-studies in that field has to do with a specific series of computer-controlled accelerators that killed about a dozen people all across North America in the mid 80s due to a really bizarre and improbable series of bugs.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

That case is literally textbook material in any graduate-level course involving ethics in computing, reliability, etc.

neogenesis2004

iTrader: (12)

I dunno about the head, but I had my right knee filleted open to repair my ACL, LCL, and PCL after a motorcycle accident years ago. The LCL tore completely off the femur so they had to cut an almost 12" long incision down the right outer side of my right knee to repair it. In the immediate area of the scar, aka the scar itself, no hair grows at all and it is about 1/8-1/4" wide in parts the whole way down. The unaffected skin beyond that grows hair normally. I think the only way you can avoid having a huge scar is if your surgeon has skills of a plastic surgeon in his cuts and stitching. Also, the staples will promote a larger scar in my experience. They have better tech like biodegradable stitches and glue that can be used for a cleaner wound, but I don't know how those apply in your situation. That would be something you'd have to consult your doctor about. He may consult a plastic surgeon, or have one assist in the surgery. That's gonna drive up the bill though.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

A plastic surgeon and a oral/maxillofacial surgeon are consulting and the oral/maxillofacial surgeon is assisting I believe.

This is what's wrong with healthcare, so whatever, but I have a good Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy so I'm not concerned about the final cost.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Mine cost quite a bit when all the settlements between the various entities and the insurance companies were completed. I believe the MRI series alone cost about $1200 out of pocket. I have a substantial policy with pretty small deductibles, too.

I can only wish you luck.

Joe,

Apparently Moffitt offers all of these and I don't know what mine was:

• Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy (SABR)
• Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS)
• Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT)
• Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT)
• Three-dimensional Computerized Radiation Therapy (3D CRT)
• Four-dimensional Computerized Radiation Therapy
• Volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT)

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Quick update. Surgery went well and everything looks good. Post op really, really sucked. 12 hours of intense pain and nausea, with lots of bleeding from the vomiting raising my blood pressure. Finally under control now. Able to chew some ice chips and jello. Probably going to end up staying a second night in the hospital to make sure the bleeding has stopped from my scalp and they can take the drain out.

Thanks everyone for the kind thoughts.