As I had laid in bed waiting for the various procedures to occur, my tongue had been exploring the damage to my lower lip. I could tell that there was a pretty large vertical cut, and that there was a mass of tissue hanging from the wound. I had no idea what this looked like to others, but imagined that it wasn't pretty.

The plastic surgeon had been pleased because the loose slice of flesh flopping around turned out to be from inside the lip, not outside. Apparently this was good news. She also explained that she was loath to trim away any of the flesh, even if it might die, because you just never knew what might live and what might die.

Before she sewed me up, I needed to use the bathroom. She warned me that I probably did not want to look in the mirror. She had taken pictures of the injury as it was now, and maybe someday I would want to see them. But tonight was not the night to be taking in that sort of image. I agreed - I wanted to be able to sleep, and wanted to remain as calm as possible. I did not want to think of myself in terms of how I looked right now - it just didn't seem like it could be a positive thing.

Ian helped me in the bathroom, since I had to manage an IV bag in addition to all the normal things like toilet paper and washing my hands. He helped to ensure that I did not look in the mirror. I had not been able to tell from anyone's face just how bad I looked. Even Ian had not cringed when he first saw me. One or two people who worked at the E.R. but weren't involved in my case looked curious, but no one turned away in disgust.

Somehow, in the bathroom, the loose piece of flesh which had been inside my mouth had come out and was hanging loosely down my chin. It felt and must have looked bizarre. I tried to stick it back inside, but couldn't. So I covered my mouth with a paper towel on the way back to my bay so people wouldn't have to see how much worse it probably looked now. I tried to tell someone the flesh had fallen out, but they told me not to worry.

As the plastic surgeon prepped me for being sewed up, I asked her what her name was. It was Christie Cavalier. She was totally no-nonsense and matter-of fact. She seemed to be a few years younger than me - more Ian's age.

She told me that although she wanted to think that the mouth was a nice clean place for conducting surgery, she knew better, that it was full of germs. But she covered the area around it with towels. She numbed up my whole lower lip and jaw area with local anesthetic. It took awhile for her to get enough dope in there for me to lose all feeling in that area.

She made her first stitch, and I asked her to "talk it through" - to explain what she was doing as she did it. She explained that the challenge was going to be to line up the two halves of the lip so that they were even. She had come to believe that some of the lip was actually missing. That was going to make her job harder. This wasn't going to be the final surgery before I looked "normal", but she wanted to do as good a job as she could in the mean time.

She stitched and stitched. She didn't really continue to talk it through, but I didn't really care, either. I was just waiting for it to be over. It seemed to take a very long time. People talk about getting this or that number of stitches, but I wasn't counting. There were so many, there was no point in trying to count.

She reached a point when I thought she might be done, but she said that she wasn't happy with the way it was turning out, and wanted to re-do some of it. She had gone in seeming very optimistic about how it would turn out, but I guess it had been harder than she'd thought it would be.

When she was finished, she explained how it now looked. One thing that had really complicated her job is that the area was so swollen, nothing looked like it really would when the swelling went down. Part of the lip looked more normal, and the other part looked very thin. So the overall effect was uneven. The area where the two halves came together was where most of the visible stitches were.

I was told that there would probably be several rounds of surgery and it might be up to six months before I was done with plastic surgery. But everyone who talked to me about it was very optimistic and told me what amazing things they could do these days. I suppose they knew how hard it would be to deal with looking weird on a daily basis, but wanted me to have hope that it was a temporary condition. Also, I didn't really know yet just how weird I would look. I was trying not to think about it.

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Table of Contents: The Big Bike Accident - September 1, 2004