Mohamed is leaving Lion Heart Medical Centre after months of treatment. Because he couldn’t afford medical care, he had put off getting the wound on his leg checked for a long time. By the time he came to our hospital, the wound was severely infected.
We see a lot of chronic wound patients like Mohamed that need several surgeries and daily care and dressings. When the wound is finally clean, the healing can begin, but quite often the wound is too big for the body to close it all by itself. The solution is an operation called skin grafting.
A skin graft is a tricky form of plastic surgery where you take pieces of the upper layer of the skin to transplant on the clean wound area. It is a very difficult procedure, as the surgeons have to do everything by hand. Normally the donor area is the upper leg of the patient, or in case of Mohamed both upper legs. The doctors have to make little cuts in the skin graft so they can stretch it over the wound area. That way there is a better chance for the graft to succeed and you need less donor skin.
To close the wound on Mohamed’s leg, he needed three of these complicated operations! After that, the last patches of skin can grow back themselves. Over time we got to know Mohamed very well, but we are glad that he can finally go home to his family!
