@barbjo I can understand how you are in some uncharted territory wondering what your skin will look like after the surgical site has healed. Your surgeon probably made a better choice, not doing stitches if she thought it would pull when you walked. That would be painful and would yank on a wound that is trying to heal. The experience I can relate to you is from breaking my ankle badly that resulted in 3 surgeries. The first placed a large metal cage outside of my ankle and it was screwed directly into the shin and heel bones to stabilize it. That allowed the swelling to subside a bit before surgery to fix the ankle in place with surgical hardware in the 2nd surgery. The 3rd surgery was to remove the hardware because it bothered me.

During the time after the 2nd surgery, I was in a cast with stitches on both sides of my ankle with about a 4 inch incision on one side and the other was less than an inch. Even though I wasn't walking or weight bearing, the stitches would catch in the gauze wrap inside the cast and pull on them which hurt. I was miserable, but had to endure that for 6 weeks. The wounds from the external cage were open deep pits and had some necrotic tissue that was later debrided in the 2nd surgery, and the larger one formed a scab and multiple layers of skin under it. The scab didn't fall off until a couple months after the cast was removed, and then it continued forming scabs and shedding layers for several months. It started as a very raised bump than was reddish. The top layers would start looking white as they separated from the stack and would rub off. It really took about 9 months until the scar and the rest of the area leveled out. Healing on the lower leg also takes a lot longer than on the rest of the body.

My husband also had melanoma removed from the side of his hand on the pinky finger side, and his was stage 2a that had broken through the skin from underneath. It was the size of an eraser on a pencil, and looked like that too because it was the same color. They took a wide excision around it, and that required a skin graft sutured in place from a plastic surgeon during the procedure. The skin graft came from the groin area, and it was red during healing and was a bit infected, and antibiotics cured that. Because all the skin and underlying tissues were removed down to the muscle and bone, the end result is that it is a sunken area on his hand of lighter colored skin graft. The "seam" at the edges are a bit raised and painful because of nerve damage from what was removed and he has numbness in part of his hand and half of the pinky finger.

One other thing I would mention is that during healing and for the first year, if you protect the wound/scar from sun exposure completely, the scar will be lighter in color. I am also a spine surgery patient with a scar on the front of my neck that was placed in a neck fold to disguise it. It is lighter than my skin and tightly closed and people never see it. I wore a neck bandana all the time if I was outside that first year. If a healing scar gets sun exposure, it forms more pigmentation and results in a darker colored scar that is usually darker than the skin around it. Protecting it from sun exposure prevents this from happening.