I had the oral surgery today to extract the damaged tooth and do the debrisment (fancy word for scraping) of dead bone tissue. The procedure went well and took only a short time. The hyperbaric treatments seemed to work in healing up all but one ulcer that had a small edge of protruding dead bone. The doctor scraped that away and saw no more dead tissue underneath it--that's the encouraging part. Her opinion is that while my osteoradionecrosis is chronic (because I've had multiple ulcers), it's towards the low end of the ORN severity scale.
She is cautiously optimistic that this could be the extent of it, but made sure I understood that she could make no guaranties. Wait, and be observant was her advice.
So, I'll chalk this up to another one of those things that have and will continue to pop up as side effects from my chemo and radiation treatments two+ years ago. What I've read is that they now consider the time for seeing these side effects at about 5 years, post-treatment. That puts me half the way there.
As always, I'm extremely grateful for being a cancer survivor for this long, and getting back so much of my pre-cancer life, and will stay prepared to deal with whatever comes next in our battle with the Prairie Dogs.
My apologies for not alerting Team Mike about the oral surgery, but we didn't know until yesterday that it was happening today.
I'll try to be more regular with my blog postings in the future, even if it's just to say that "no news is good news."
Mike
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