I know I previously spared you all of the most recent gross pictures of my resulting "Moon Crater" from the latest Skin Cancer removal operation in January. So apologies if it is a bit much for you all. I felt I had to share it as there is a lot more to the story than just the awful picture. If you look right near the big new "workings" you can see the other Squamous Cell Carcinoma site nearby which confirms the newer one is a lot bigger than the last one.

One really frustrating thing about all this "head stuff" has been the fact that for months, now, I have not been able to wash whatever hair I have left on my head due to the dressings covering the operation site. Add the time for the previous op dressing preventing washing to the question and you know how annoying it has been that no shampoo has been on my head for all this time! I recently discovered a layer of dandruff sitting on my head for so long for the same reason.

Louise has tried washing around the dressing for me but it has been so difficult.

The time has now arrived for the close up of the wound. I was spared of a graft from my leg for this last surgery as explained in the last chapter. This time a graft will again be taken from one of the old graft sites off the same leg (right) as the two previous grafts. We will manage the healing process of this graft better than we did the last one.

You know what they say...

"When all else fails...' READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!' "

We made a mistake with the previous graft in that we had the local doctor's nurse change the dressing way too early. Apart from it being a very painful process for me, we learned it should not have been changed so soon.  We discovered this on the post-op instructions that we should have read more closely! It would not have been such a painful exercise, had we left the dressing in place, longer.

The hospital had told us to contact a Domiciliary (home) Nursing service to change my head dressing on a 2 or 3-day basis. Due to money-saving antics, there was no "domiciliary" service offered. Instead, the "service" directed us to get assistance from the nurse at our local Doctor's office to show Louise (known to a lot of you as "Tootsie55" in here for a long time) what to do here at home. That is what we did.

After the nurse did the initial re-dressing of my head wound prior to this last operation, we acquired all the necessary bandages and stuff for Louise to do all the re-dressing here at home, every two or three days. At the follow-ups at the hospital Out Patients' clinic, the staff were impressed with Louise's work, looking after me.

One interesting thing happened in the follow-up process. We actually met a girl, now in her thirties and a nurse who was four years old when her parents and she lived next door to us. Small world, ha. I remembered her Mum and she looked exactly like her mother.

The creepy neighbours I have written about elsewhere were living in that house, later on.

Yesterday, we got the call from the hospital for me to go in on Monday. Normally, there would be a Pre-Admission Clinic but it seems they are keen to get me in there and close up the wound for healing so I can proceed to the Radiotherapy sessions. These will be half-hour sessions, daily over four days, for four weeks.

As I have written before, we hope this is the end of the Skin Cancer story for me.