Skin Cancer Removal

What is skin cancer removal?

A cancer diagnosis is very difficult to accept. Understanding that treating your skin cancer may result in scars or disfigurement can also be troubling. Understanding your concerns and guide you through treatment explaining the resulting effect on your health and appearance is the role of the plastic surgeon.

Skin cancer, much like any form of cancer, may require surgery to remove the cancerous growth. This surgical ressection of cancerous and other skin lesions utilizes specialized techniques to preserve the patient’s health and appearance.

Although no surgery is without scars, all the efforts are make to treat skin cancer without dramatically changing the appearance of the patient.

The first step

The medical appointment is the first step and it is the time to discuss the surgery, your expectations and the desired outcome. At this stage the patient should report his health history, previous surgeries, current medications and the use of alcohol or tobacco.

Health insurance plan should cover skin cancer surgery, related complications or another surgery to reconstruct your appearance, if necessary.

Procedure steps

Depending on the size, type and location of the lesion, there are many ways to remove skin cancer and reconstruct your appearance if necessary.

Skin cancer can be like an iceberg. What is visible on the skin surface sometimes is only a small portion of the growth. Beneath the skin, the cancerous cells cover a much larger region and there are no defined borders.

In some cases, depending on the size, localization and specific characteristics of some lesions it might be necessary the use of frozen sections during the removal of skin cancer. After the lesion is ressected, small parts of the tissue are removed and immediately sent to the patologist to discover and define the borders of the cancerous area. It helps to make sure that all of the cancer has been removed.

A skin cancer lesion that is particularly large may be reconstructed with a local flap, repositioning adjacent tissue is over the wound. The suture line is positioned to follow the natural creases and curves of the face if possible, to minimize the obviousness of the resulting scar. Several variations of local flap procedures may be used to reconstruct a specific area of the face or body, and these techniques and resulting scar patterns are discussed and evaluated prior to surgery. More complex wounds may require more than one procedure (or “stage”) to achieve a satisfactory result.

The wound might be treated with a skin graft instead of a local flap. A skin graft is a thin bit of skin removed from one area of the body and relocated to the wound site.

Although every effort is made to restore your appearance as closely and naturally as possible, the most important factor is that your skin cancer is effectively removed.

Once you have been diagnosed with skin cancer, there is a higher risk to develop another skin cancer. Therefore, it is important to always be aware and regularly perform the examination of suspicious lesions.

Source: www.plasticsurgery.org