According to the release notes, I was allowed to remove the bandages on my head after two days. Wake up the second day after surgery, realize that the bandage is flopping around at the top of your head, decide it’s time to remove it. Made sense in my head, so that’s what we did. (Note that if seeing staples in a person’s head might make you feel squeamish, you should move on to a different blog post…)
And then I was immensely glad to have someone to move the bandages because while it was able to flop around at the top of my head, other parts were stuck significantly more securely. Maybe it was because of additional adhesive, maybe there was dried blood caked in the gauze… it wasn’t a smooth removal process. But it was eventually removed and we got to see my new scars in all their glory!
Well, scars contained within the confines of the staplers attached to my head, anyway… but still glorious! If you don’t believe me, you can take a look for yourselves in some no-dried-blood-caked-in-the-gauze pictures, courtesy of Teresa:
I suppose I could have called this something like “Chicks dig scars, right?” But before I saw what was under the bandages, Teresa mentioned something about the fact that they used staples. That wasn’t a big deal to me.
Flash back to December 2001. I was in the epilepsy ward in United Hospital undergoing EEG testing and met someone else there who’d had brain surgery shortly before I arrived. In his case, they did a resection—removing a section of brain tissue—in an attempt to limit or prevent his seizures. The amount of cutting his surgery required was pretty extensive, so there was a number of curvy scars on his head that were closed up with staples, something I’d never seen before. And he almost wore it like a badge of honor to say there were 60 staples in his head.
“You might have 60 staples here…”
It’s a possibility, I haven’t zoomed in on the pictures to check, but there’s a very large difference between my head and his back in 2001. Think of it like the difference between staples that can hold a maximum of 12 pages together and staples that can be used to attach upholstery to furniture. What that guy’s head looked like and what mine currently looks like are very, very different in scale.
So I was walking the dog earlier tonight, thinking about writing this blog post and whether the pictures above might lend to potential dry heaves in potential readers, then I thought about Milton’s red Swingline stapler in Office Space. It’s quite possible that the only common denominator between this post and that movie is staples, but sometimes that’s all you need to hold two things together.