Skin cancer can have devastating physical and emotional effects, particularly when it attacks the face. Sometimes people lose a nose, lips, or other major features of the face, leaving them looking and feeling disfigured and broken. But there is hope. Through facial reconstruction, a skin cancer patient can look and feel beautiful again.
Utah plastic surgeons can perform procedures that can help someone whose face has been disfigured by skin cancer. These procedures generally use facial flaps to replace or cover damaged skin. Facial flaps are divided into two categories: random and axial. Random flaps have small vessels to supply blood to them and are not as stable as axial flaps. But a two-step process including the “delaying” of the flap can increase the stability of the random flap. Axial flaps identify a specific artery to bring needed oxygenated blood.
The Abbe Estlander Flap is an axial flap that is used for patients who have carcinoma of the lip, usually caused by smoking or sun exposure. The cancerous tissue must be removed, leaving the person’s mouth deformed. But the Abbe Estlander Flap is a two-step surgical procedure that can remove the affected tissue and reform the mouth with minimal scarring.
Smoking is also often the cause for other facial cancers, including those that attack the nose. For these, a forehead flap, an axial flap, is often used as another two-step surgical procedure to replace the removed tissue on the nose and then divide it into a normal-looking nose. After the first step, the results may look strange, but the second step involves dividing the pedicle into the shape of two nostrils and a well-formed nose. The final result is often remarkable.
Random flaps include the rotation advancement flap, in which a large rounded flap is cut to stretch over the area that needs tissue replacement. This is often used on the scalp as the scalp does not readily stretch. Another is the rhomboid flap, indicating the shape of the cut area that is cut and rotated to cover the site of damage.
The bilobed flap is basically made of two arches cut side by side to stretch over the affected area and the newly cut area in a one-step procedure. And the nasolabial flap is a long narrow flap cut alongside the nose and stretched over the nose in a one-step procedure. Both of these can produce excellent results with just one surgery.
Flaps that begin to die can sometimes be saved by moving to a better blood supply. But not all flaps will take. This type of surgery is only as successful as the blood the body supplies to it after placement. But most of the time, the results are remarkable, taking what would otherwise be a horrendous disfigurement down to a simple scar that is often barely noticeable.
