You’ve had a hard journey. I can relate to your experience. I also had a fibula free flap which two days after the 11 hour surgery failed because of vascular issues, three days later again the venous side of the blood supply failed. Back into surgery, then two days after that another vascular failure and yet another surgery for long hours, with a much more extensive pectoral muscle flap created to get non radiated blood supply to the fibula that was now plated to my mandible where they removed the necrotic bone from large radiation exposure twenty years before.

It has now been 7 months with no new issues, but life is very different. I have had to relearn to do even the simplest things like walk. I can relate to your situation because I am living it. What I look like is far from normal, and life has many compromises. But it is life, and I have meaningful work to do each day, though some of what I did before I cannot do, as I no longer can speak in a way most people understand me.

We must endeavor to find two things. Acceptance of things we cannot change, and a meaningful use of the extra time we have been given. While we can discuss why things succeeded or failed, what is important is not that we suffered, what is important is what do we learn from that, and how do we apply ourselves in the best way possible moving forward. The answers to those questions I believe guide our future, not what happened to us that brought us here. There is no yesterday, there is only today. How will we play the cards we have been given?

This is not something I have discussed publicly before. But I wanted you to see that you are not alone.