Mark's Incision Pictures

Here are some pictures of Mark's head in various stages of healing.  If you're not into gruesome, this is probably a good post to skip.

This is his head with all the staples still in (all 31 of them) right before the nurse came in take them out.

This is the nurse taking them out. 

And, because I would be curious if I hadn't seen it, I took a close up of the tool that she's using to remove the staples.

Here's a chunk of the staples that she took out.  She still had a few more to remove when I took this, so this isn't all of them.

Mark's head, with the staples newly removed.

Mark's head, with the staples out and after a few hours of Mark scratching...  Yes, it's starting to bleed and open up a bit.  He has always been a head scratcher, that's his default move when he's thinking.  It's much worse now that it itches too.

This is almost two full weeks after the staples were removed, and right after he gave himself a haircut (in an effort to make it stop itching so much), so the scar is more visible.  The front part of his incision is starting to heal.  There are two spots towards the back of his head that have not fared so well.  The big black spot is the one that worries me the most.  The black is dead skin and is separating from the healthy skin next to it.  Normally, in a regular wound, that wouldn't be a bad thing, but that incision is not shallow...

The other spot, that I'm not sure you can see very well is right below the black part.  It used to be black, but Mark scratched off the scab, and now it's an open hole.  I kept telling him he was going to lose brain matter out of those spots if he kept scratching, but that didn't stop him... (Probably because he knew that there was no way that was true...)

The good news is that it's now been a few weeks since that last picture and his incision is starting to look much better.