Surgery: 21/04/08
The one that cured it
My surgeon was expecting this to be just a minor cleanup, he was going to open up the area at the bottom of the would and was planning to hopefully close the would with sutures afterwards. When I came round from the surgery he came to see me in the recovery room and said that he’d had to leave it open. It was big hole, he emphasised “a really big hole” what he’d found was a large area, basically about half the area of the previous z-plasty, which was infected and nasty looking. he later told me it was rather like an octopus with sinus tracks going out in all directions. I was kept in overnight again and the nurses re-dressed my wound in the morning. I asked the nurse how big the hole was and she indicated that it was about 6-8cm wide and about 2cm deep. I wasn’t in that much pain but I was a bit daunted at the prospect of caring for this big wound and how long it would take to heal.
However, despite the open wound being a fair bit more painful to begin with, say the first week to ten days, when I was taking pain killers regularly, (and I knew about it when I didn’t take them), it was much more comfortable than previous surgeries, I was told I could sit down on it as much as I liked and that I could be active just not to go wild with it. Not that I was going to. So I was sitting relatively comfortably after about a week. I had the district nurses changing my dressings and re-packing the wound at the weekend and I was up to my local surgery during the week.
It healed really fairly quickly, in comparison to the size of the wound. All the nurses who saw me were impressed by how well I healed, I had no big infections and apart from slowing down at the end and having a couple of occurrences of the wound re-opening after having looked as though it had closed, it was ok. All told, healing time was about 4 months, although after about 3 months it was 95% done. I really watched what I was eating and I got lots of rest ,and drank lots of water, which I think is such a big thing, look after yourself properly and you’ll cut your healing time down a lot. It was during the healing from this fourth surgery that I started this site and I wrote a kind of healing diary blog so if you’re interested in the details, what dressings I used etc. take a look at the Surgery No. 4 diary and scroll to the bottom of the page for the first entry.
If I had my time again, I would definitely have opted for wide excision with open healing (known as secondary intention in the medical world) the first time around. The downsides are that you’ll be at the mercy of your wound and it’s dressings, given that you need to have a nurse look at it and redress the wound every day. It does take a long time to heal up and you will have a large scar. However, it’s much easier to treat infections if they occur, your nurses can see what’s going on in the wound and the chances of a reoccurrence are lower, and when it comes down to it that’s the biggy. It was a long road but I got there, I’ve got the war wound to prove it, but I came out the other side. My surgeon and my nurses were great, and I hope that if you’re suffering with a Pilonidal or healing from surgery, you’ll be on the road to recovery soon.
