Surgery on eyelid

A year ago, I posted about surgery on my thumb, after having drilled a hole through it.

Arrived home from hospital today, afer surgery on an eyelid. I'm posting about this, as it affects current projects, in particular the Meanderer trike project.

Photo taken yesterday, after surgery:

Technically, treatment was very interesting. I noticed that the right-eye lower eyelid had a swelling, was red and sagging. Went to my GP, he referred me to an eye specialist, who said he cannot handle it and referred me the eye clinic of a public hospital.

The doctor at the hospital told me that there is so little flesh to work with, that if he had to cutout the cancer, that he confirmed is BCC, he would cut out more than necessary, to be on the safe side. So he referred me to another specialist, a prvate clinic.

This is interesting; the doctor at the private clinic has a technique for cutting out the cancer and no more. She has on-site testing, so she made a first attempt, then tested if there are good skin cells all around the incision; if not she sees where to have another go, and finally no cancer cells remain. In my case, two removals were performed. As there was about an hour wait after the first removal, she had to reapply local anaesthic for the second removal. Finally, she sewed the two eyelids together, then taped a patch over the eye.

Then I went home, then next morning went back to the public hospital, where the doctor finished the job. As a lot of the eyelid had been removed, he replaced it with flesh cut from my arm, upper inside. That was done under general anaesthetic, so I was out for the duration. The above photo is when back in my bed after the operation. I felt fine, but they wouldn't let me go, insisted that I stay overnight for observation. I got released at 9am this morning.

Have to go back to the hospital tomorrow, for the doctor to check his handiwork. Then in the coming weeks, will go back to have the stitches removed, first from the arm, then the eyelid.

I don't know if will be able to do much building of the Meanderer trike. Will go to the Men's Shed on Monday, and see how it goes. But, not having binocular vision imposes constraints. Difficult to guage depths.  like, when I move a finger to the phone screen, can't see how far away it is; not easily anyway.

Coping OK on the computer, so will probably catch up with some EasyOS work over the next few days.  

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