You know how I mentioned yesterday that I wasn’t sure whether Paul’s skin graft looked different from day to day? Well, today when I changed the dressing, it looked different, and in a way that doesn’t seem good to me. Most of the graft looks the way that I think it’s supposed to, and at the edges it appears to be connecting quite nicely to the surrounding skin. It’s even starting to look like fairly normal, if somewhat reddened, skin (which is quite a change from the bruised purpleish color it had when I first saw it).
However, there’s an area in the middle, over some of the tendons, where it looks like the graft is thinning out. It’s the area that I described last week as looking a little raw, the area that Dr. Futran and Dr. Schwartz expressed a little concern about, but thought would heal fine. Today it looked to me as if what I was seeing in the middle of that area was not skin tissue, but possibly the tendon that should be underneath said skin tissue. (But really, what do I know about what tendon looks like? I’ve seen tendons in a frog from high-school biology lab more than half my life ago, and little bits in the occasional cut of meat.) Strangely, this small questionable area has elicited the first squeamish feelings that I’ve had throughout this whole process… which leads me to believe that, for me at least, the fear that something’s going badly is a major contributing factor.
So, tomorrow morning I’m going to call our helpful nurse practicioner Carol, and see about getting Paul in so that someone can take a look at his arm.