Plastic surgery???

I had my B/S 12-28-04 and was told of a center that will do the surgery for a very reasonable $$$ if you donated your excess skin to the fireman's burn center, located somewhere in Tennessee. Has anyone heard of this place?? If so please post it to the Tennessee or Ohio message board. or e-mail me with the info at [email protected] Thank you all for any help! Tauna Bowman Alliance, OH

This is a rumor that pops up from time to time. Burn centers can't use our skin, it is too stretched out and damaged to be used for skin grafts.

That is just a rumor. "Donating" skin is cost prohibitive. The amount of transplantable tissue obtained from tissue reduction surgery is minimal when compared to the amount of tissue obtained from another source, such as cadaveric (deceased) tissue donor. The procurement costs would be much greater as it would require the services of doctors, nurses, anesthetists, and other health care professionals as well as the use of an operating room and other hospital services. Cadaveric donation requires only trained tissue recovery technicians, and they can procure tissue after the body has been sent to the morgue (rather than in an operating room), thus keeping expenses to a minimum. Additionally, cadaveric donated tissue can be used for transplant soon after recovery (as soon as quality assurance testing is complete), but the FDA requires that tissues recovered from living donors must be placed into quarantine for six months. At the end of six months, all serologic testing (HIV and Hepatitis) must be repeated before that tissue can be used.