Your body is so incredible at healing itself. I’ve had a number of surgeries and while the surgical wound may be swollen and uncomfortable for months after, if properly closed it should be healed well enough to not fall apart by day 3. Most surgeons use “dissolving” stitches made of collagen for the top layer that form a “base” that your body uses to form scar tissue and heal faster.
For sure. 2020 was a rough year for me: I had a routine appendectomy during which the surgeon accidentally punctured my intestine with a suture while closing up the laparoscopic portholes. Sent me home that way. And as you might expect, I came back with a lot of abdominal pain. They had to open up my abdomen with a big 6” vertical incision this time in order to fix and clean everything.
As for the huge incision, they just put in around 8 staples. That was it. They intentionally wanted it to allow inflammation-base fluid build-up to escape. Super gross. But, nothing gross actually happened, and it healed up in less than a week. Definitely left a bad scar though.
In many cases, I’ve seen that they use two layers of sutures. One deeper layer that does the real job of holding everything together, and those are almost always dissolving style. Then a second layer of sutures that run just under the top layer of skin, and are designed to keep the scarring as minimal as possible.
