Whenever someone sees me for the first time, invariably they tell me how good I look. Of course, this is always flattering, because while I do think I look good compared to how we all *thought* I might look, I still definitely don’t look like your average person on the street. Maybe more like the victim of a moderately bad car accident or burn?

But still! My neck is not NEARLY as sunken in as we had been prepared to expect (you can really only see the difference in the two sides of my neck if you look closely), and as far as I have tested, I still have full function of my neck! My range of motion (how far I can turn/tilt my head) is steadily improving and is only really impacted by my discomfort with stretching my scars too much.

Even the scars don’t look utterly terrible. They are constantly covered in an oil slick of bacitracin right now, which melts and spreads across my neck, making me very shiny, but we’ve heard that we can stop with that on Monday, as long as everything continues to heal well. I’ve also heard from several others who’ve had or know people who’ve had similar incisions and they have said that their scars healed up very well. Hopefully mine will as well!

I’ve abandoned wearing any kind of bandages on anything, mainly because I could only really cover my graft, and that doesn’t look all that bad when you take it in with the rest of my scars 🙂 It’s kind of lovely not wearing anything.

When I wore the bandage, I would get questions about what happened. Now that I just have my 10″ scar and the graft out for the world to see, I haven’t gotten a single question 🙂 However, it could be that my stomach is now so enormous that people first look there and then sneak a peek at my face, which is perfectly fine with me!

Here are pictures of my face and belly and a picture of my non-naked belly (and unscarred side of my face). Hopefully these will help people know what I look like a little better post-surgery!