Reconstructed
I had surgery two days ago. This was my second surgery of the year and they were both related to the same tumor. Since this second surgery was going to be more intrusive into the muscles of my back my surgeon enlisted the help of a specialist who would be there to reconstruct the area after all the excising was done.
Pre-surgery, when I went for a visit with the reconstructive — aka “plastic” — surgeon, he told me that he thought he would have to “move some flaps around” to ensure a good result with the skin graft. While that seemed a little puzzling at the time, I understood it to have something to do with the fact that you can’t graft skin over exposed bone and it might be necessary to jostle some muscle tissue around and then graft the skin on top of that.
Post-surgery, I can tell that he certainly did something with the muscles in my back. During previous recoveries it’s been the incisions and the stitches that hurt the most. This time the largest discomfort comes from the actual muscles. It feels as though I woke up on the morning after the biggest back workout of my life. The muscles themselves are sore the way they are after I’ve put way too much weight on the bar at the gym. And it’s not confined to just my back. The latissimus dorsi and whatever connecting muscle runs from my back and down along my left-hand ribs are both so sore that it’s hard to move my left arm or shoulder without wincing.
I don’t know what the actual procedure involved — I’ll get to ask the doc at a follow-up appointment in a week — but it seems to me that he was really jerking stuff around and pulling very hard on relaxed, sleeping me.