I sometimes get messages from a medical forum that I used to belong to, and I recently had someone ask me about the healing process of skin grafts, since they were facing the possibility of having one themselves. Doctors rarely, if ever, give you detailed information on how quickly they heal. I meant to post these pictures years ago after being asked by a few different people on the same forum, but life happened, and I never got around to it. So, here they are. If you're reading this, you've likely ignored my warning on the previous page. They're ugly, they're hard to look at, and yet they likely saved my life.

If you don't know my personal story, here's a shortened version of the second worst event in my life.

In August of 2016, I discovered a lump on my right leg that wasn't there the previous day. It was in the same spot as an old scar from when I was little. On October 5th I had surgery to remove it, and found out the following week that it was an extremely rare type of sarcoma (cancer). The small scar had actually been cancer the entire time, and I unknowingly had been fighting cancer for at least thirty-five years. They referred me to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, who immediately became concerned that the first surgery had spread the cancer throughout most of my lower right leg. The MRI scans that followed proved that their suspicions were correct. On March 10th, 2017, they removed the skin, subcutaneous layer, and muscle fascia from most of my right calf. They then took the same layers from my entire left thigh to replace the contaminated tissue, and then took a skin graft from my right thigh to patch that missing flesh. They couldn't simply do a skin graft over my calf because the area had been damaged from repeated radiation treatments in the weeks before the surgery. Grafts don't heal well over radiated tissue.

The graft on the left leg was actually an easy injury to heal from. As horrific as it looked, there was little pain associated with it, and I had use of my left leg after the vacuum was taken off of the wound seven days later. The area they took the graft from was a different story. It had a raw, gritty pain, like road rash -- but it was well controlled with opioid painkillers.

The flap of tissue on my right calf took a lot more healing, but that wound had nothing to do with a skin graft. It took me seven months to walk unassisted, another three months to walk any real distance, and almost two years before I had my coordination back. I'm still left with neuropathy in both legs, but I can walk, and I'm alive, so I don't dwell on any limitations that are out of my control. I really do consider myself lucky, and I'm grateful to the staff at SCCA, the UW Medical Center, and Harborview Hospital for giving me back a life that I thought was over.