Microsurgery
By Dr. Rishavy
Here at Northland Plastic Surgery, one of the services that we provide is reconstruction for trauma. Specific to plastic surgery would be soft tissue trauma, but it can also include bones.
The types of traumas that we take care of and that we treat involve burns, frostbite, facial fractures, any hand or upper extremity injury, and then any defect again to a soft tissue part of the rest of the body. In that or along those lines, this trauma reconstruction can also involve microsurgery. Microsurgery is where you need the assistance of magnification, sometimes in glasses, called loops, or actually a big type of machine called a microscope, where we’re using very small instruments, very small suture to tie together usually an artery and a vein to help restore damage to that tissue or lost to that tissue. That can involve such things as replantation of a finger or hand, as well as in reconstruction of areas.
One, in particular, is where women have mastectomies and we take tissue from another part of the body and fill it in. Again, that’s a microsurgery operation, where we actually take the tissue from one spot and put it up back to the breast to restore and re-fashion the breasts. These particular types of breast reconstruction are referred to either as TRAM, or DIEP. These are the type of flaps that we use. In addition to breast cancer, there are other cancers that surgeons will excise and then ask us to fill in the defect. These can involve a large portion of the head or the neck, and again, almost any other part of the body. Many of the times the lower extremity. It involves microsurgery where we’re taking tissue from one area, we’re dividing the vessels and then use with a microscope and micro instruments. We’re tying it into local vessels, then kind of moving that tissue to help fill in the defect and to restore that loss of space and function.