Here are the first before and after pictures. First up, this is just before being wheeled into the operating room looking surprisingly awake for 6am...
...and this is me shortly after waking up in the recovering room after more than eight hours of surgery and looking considerably less awake.
For the first part of the procedure they placed me on my back and entered through my abdomen. This picture was taken about a week after surgery. There are no visible stitches. Instead, the surgeon used self dissolving internal stitches and surgical glue, aka super glue. BTW, no I did not swallow a basketball. This swelling, known as distention, takes a while to go back down.
The next step was to close the incision in my abdomen, flip me over and work from the back. This image of the incision on my back was taken about a week after surgery. There are no stitches, instead, they used steri-strips. For scale, the tapes covering the steri-strips are just under one inch wide. A vacuum drain was attached through the hole to the right of the incision.
