Mucocele

It's prevalent in almost 70% of Pinoys, Hispanics and other Asians, but very little has been written about these races' predisposition for it. In fact there's no real known cause for it except that it happens because of a trauma to the lip. What's bizaare that 80% of the time, it happens on the lower right lip.

And that's where I feel the pinch of the sutures now. After two months of thinking it would quietly go away the way it stealthily appeared, I decided to cut out the little bugger. Well, the doctor cut it out actually, in a 30-45 minute procedure.

It is officially my first out-patient operation, not counting my tooth extraction when I was 12. WIth this one, I actually had to lie on an operating table, with those characteristic lights overhead. They put an eye screen on my face, that cloth with a hole for them to work on the part they need to reach. Then the doctor injected anesthsia (lidocaine, i think it was) and in a few minutes, I felt my lip get thick. He started prodding around my lip, testing if the point of whatever blade he was poking on my skin hurt me. When we were both sure, he decided to cut.

Mucocele is actually a blocked mucuous duct in the lip that swells because of trapped mucuous. There thousands of glands in the lip that secrete mucous to keep the mouth moist. Mucocele forms when the gland and the duct are blocked. Picture a hot air balloon: the basket is the gland, the flame is the duct and the balloon is the mucocele. That's the structure.

So the doc cuts my lip and exposes the bubble, and prays that he gets the whole thing out in one go. But as he predicted earlier, the moment the forceps touched it, it burst, and the mucuous flowed out. He and the nurse wiped it off, and proceeded to remove the blocked duct and gland. He prodded deep in the cut to get all of it out. If something gets left behind, the mucocele will recur.

He pulls out whatever's stuck and I could feel how deep he had to dig. He had to inject another feww cc's of anesthsia becuase I was feeling something. He checked around the area and when he finally was sure it was clean, he flushed the open wound with a solution of water and medicine and proceeded to sew me up.

He was using the absorbable kind. He stitched twice, but wasn't satisfied and did another. But in the process of tying up the third stitch, the second one came lose. So he had to redo that, and the anesthesia as well. Finally, he cleaned up. I was asked to sit down and pronounced good to go.

I was given a towel with a big block of ice to put on my lip to bring the swelling down. Then he showed me the specimen: it literally looked like a deflated hot-air balloon. The gland at the bottom, the bubble on the top, laid out on a suture like a faint letter "S". It was uncanny. It was about 3/4 inches long. And all that time, that was what was causing the mucocele.

The doctor said I was to go on a soft diet for three days. And that I could rest tomorrow. Yey! But I won't be bed-ridden. In fact, I'll be working! At least I'll have some me time. It's time to get me back together...I was sooo nervous in the operating room. I was conscious the whole time, and though it wasn't painful, feeling the tugging and hearing the clinking of metal made me jumpy. I tried to relax and not think. But once in a while I could feel my neck, back and hands tense up. I focused on keeping them relaxed, and that helped a lot.

Right now, the swelling has subsided a bit, and I can feel the pinch of the wound and the hole where the the needle enetered to deliver the lidocaine. It looks bruised but the doc says it should subside soon enough. In five days it should "resolve", and it would be unnoticeable in two weeks.

Well I hope so. And I'm praying no deformity happens. Phew. This year marks my first, and hopefully last meeting with the little bugger. And hopefully things do return to normal in a couple of weeks. :)