Face-lift Chronicles: Uh oh/39-42 Days Post-surgery

On Friday, July 24, I couldn’t help but wonder why the area above my left eyelid remained swollen and dark. I pulled the lid up to the brow bone and discovered between one and four black plastic sutures still embedded in the skin! These were supposed to be removed the first week. Some were almost invisible; the skin had covered them. I called the advice nurse who told me to make an appointment at Plastic Surgery the following Monday. I called on Monday and was told to go to Emergency on Wednesday, as the clinic wasn’t open until then, and there was no room for an appointment. Frustrated, I was determined to see if those little black lines really WERE sutures and not wee tiny fine veins--though I didn’t have them on the other eyelid. I worked on the most visible one, and managed to get under it with a pair of very fine tweezers with points. It was definitely thin black plastic. Yes, it hurt, but not as bad as I thought it would. I started to pull. And pull. And pull. All of the fine black lines were a single suture. I held my eyelid taut and pulled. The suture turned out to be two inches long, laced under about ½ inch of my eyelid (the entire dark and swollen part). I iced it immediately, and put on a topical antibiotic. It was definitely still infected, but not much. My body was taking care of itself very well (Thank you, body!). The eyelid has been responding well—I can feel a difference already.
If any of the three doctors who examined me after the sutures were removed had taken a good look at the troubled area, they would have seen the sutures and saved me weeks of problems. The lesson here: we are our own best physicians; no one knows our bodies as we do, and our health and welfare is first and foremost in our own hands. Not to say modern medicine isn’t full of miracles—it is. But MDs are human, in spite of their best efforts. Take care of yourselves!