Saturday, 10 January 2009

It's a new year, so why not a new hackergotchi I say?

Brandon and Robin came around on Thursday night, and where there's Brandon, there's his camera, so he got a decent enough mugshot to convert into a less crap hackergotchi (after I spent a few hours fighting with the GIMP today)

Sarah brought The Story of Stuff to my attention today. It's well worth 20 minutes of your time, irrespective of where you live.

...and there was a distinct feeling of deja vu. At least the procedure itself was nowhere near as long (under 2 hours).

On Thursday, Sarah had some day-surgery to have her sternal wires removed. The top one was causing her some discomfort because the skin there was the thinnest (whether that in itself was related to any of the previous incision complications remains uncertain).

The surgical team popped in to pre-op to autograph their work (seriously, they initialled her chest) before they started, and asked if she wanted just the top wire removed, or all of them. We consulted the Magic Eight Ball application on my phone, and it gave a resoundingly affirmative response, so she got them all removed.

Despite removing them all being a bit more surgically invasive, I think this is for the best. It means none of the other wires can cause any problems down the track requiring yet another trip to the operating room.

They also did some scar revision on the top part of the scar, where it was a bit stretched (from the previous complications), so incisionally speaking, she's had almost as much incision work done as the original heart surgery.

Ironically, this made the plastic surgery (laser treatment and steroid injections) she had late last year largely redundant.

She took the dressing off the incision this morning, and we had our first look at it. It certainly looks a lot better than before, so fingers crossed it won't get infected this time, and the overall long-term result will look better.