Six Weeks Ago...I got an ear...

Not too much new to report yet.  My body is still healing well.  I got the okay to start skiing, provided it's above 25 degrees and I keep my ear toasty warm!  I also found out that I will probably always have to protect my ear some at night since I will roll onto that side.  Dr. Griffiths said that something like gauze or cotton balls tucked behind the ear with a cap or band holding it all in place would work.  This needs to continue since cartilage is living tissue.  This means that if I spend a lot of time putting pressure on my new ear at any point in its lifetime, it could cause the cartilage to change shape, which I obviously don't want!

Dr. Griffiths also said that I should be able to go into next winter without being super cautious about the cold on the ear (just normally trying to stay warm - a hat's not a bad idea).  The same kind of timeline exists as far as friction (i.e. rubbing) against the ear.  This means I still need to find an alternate way to wear my CPAP mask for now.  I'm going to send a picture of me in it to Dr. Griffiths so he can also brainstorm.  My current methods of getting it on my head without it rubbing the new ear aren't working well enough and my sleep apnea is therefore not very well treated at the moment.  (I'm having 2-4 times more lapses in breathing an hour than usual, sometimes even beating the average times that they found in my sleep study when I was diagnosed!)

Since the ear is looking pretty similar, I thought I'd try something new today.  I made a very rough, hind-sighted time lapse video.  I say that because obviously each picture is not identical in size, lighting, etc. since I hadn't thought of this idea until a few days ago.  What's neat is that you can see that healing, swelling, redness, etc. is not a linear process.  It varies a lot day to day and hour to hour depending on what the ear has to go through each day and how long it's been since I was horizontal sleeping.  A few days ago, I did have a little mishap with the top of the ear.  I had a band around my head, but it had a hard point to it, which, while I slept, pushed into the new ear.  It's still VERY red, and a little extra swollen in that area, but luckily it did not break the skin at all.  I did ask Dr. Griffiths about it, and he said that it should be fine.  If it had broken through the skin, I would just apply the bacitracin ointment on it while it healed.

So, without further ado, here's the video I made (bear with me, I've also never even made any type of video before...I think maybe making this in OpenOffice Presentation might have been easier...but then again, I've also never worked with anything but Microsoft PowerPoint...and I purposely didn't date anything...I don't want so much focus on dates that you can't pay attention to the changes in the ear.

Enjoy!