Another Status Report on my Face

I realized I haven't told you folks about the new plastic surgeon I've been seeing, so here's the backstory followed by what happened when I went to see him on Wednesday.

After I had that terrible appointment with my lazy, useless, callous, no-good plastic surgeon, I fired him and went in search of another one. Fortunately for me, one of my neighbors is an LPN who works for a local Oral Maxillofacial Surgeon (the exact same kind of doctor who sewed my lips up after the attack) and who had noticed we had one less dog on our nightly walks, which led to a conversation about the injury. She, too, thought my old plastic surgeon was full of crap, and was confident that her boss could fix me up. She even set me up with a free consultation with him!

During the appointment, the OMS was a whirlwind of activity like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil: he came in, examined me, said "Oh yeah, we can fix this easily by doing X, Y, and Z," and then he was out of the room. My friend the LPN set some things up, the doctor whirled into the room again, and gave me several injections of something called Kenalog right in the scar tissue (I'm pleased to report that I could actually feel the needle going in, which is an odd thing to be happy about but that means I have less nerve damage to that area than I feared) before he whirled out again. Then the LPN gave me some scar reducing gel, telling me to use it 2x a day and to continue rubbing itamin E into my scar once a day, and that I'd need to come back in six weeks.

Let me tell you, those three things really reduced the swelling. If you look at these selfies I took during my trip to Fredericksburg, you can see the scar if you look really hard (it's hidden under dermablend -- which, by the way, is expensive but worth the cost) but it's not obvious and it's definitely not puffy.

That brings us to a few days ago, when I had my 6-week checkup. Both the LPN and OMS were really pleased with how the scar had visibly reduced in thickness, and so they gave me another round of Kenalog injections (which actually hurt worse than last time, which again I'll interpret as a good thing). Then they used a laser on the scar, focusing on the red parts where the stitching was, to blend the color in with the rest of my face.

I'm not going to say it was pleasant, but it wasn't bad. It hurt worse when I got my tattoo. Heck, the Kenalog injections hurt worse! But let me tell you, I looked AWFUL afterwards because the lasered areas were irritated like heck and oozing blood, so no pictures of that here.

I have another appointment in 2 more weeks, probably to see how my skin has recovered from the laser. I'll let you know how that goes.