Post Surgery Treatments

It has been a couple of weeks since my surgery which removed my Port-a-cath and put in a PICC line. Outside of the initial mess that the surgery caused me, everything has gone fairly ok I guess. I was on a 24 hour drip for 2 weeks straight. Last Tuesday, I was officially taken off the drip and put on an oral antibiotic instead.

They say that everything looks to be going ok. This is kind of hard to tell really as the infection never went into my blood stream so outside of doing ultrasounds on me again, they can’t really tell if there is still a pocket of it under my skin.

It was pretty tricky the last couple of weeks because I have been doing my utmost to hide both the bag of antibiotics noisily doing its business and the PICC line in my arm. For the first week, I just wore the same pants every day that had really big cargo pockets and could hold the entire bag. But soon I decided I needed more than one pair of pants for this purpose so we went to Kohl’s to pick up a cheap pair of pants. This was still a harsh thing to do for our budget as we don’t really have $30 for pants but it was needed to help hide.

Of course they left the wound in my chest open in hopes of letting the infection come out on its own. Again, they say it is healing well. It is certainly closing up more each week but it is not closed as of yet. They are putting in less and less packing each week to allow the wound to close up a little more with every visit and that seems to be working but it is still super creepy. There is less stuff coming out of the wound now than there was at first so I think that is promising too.

Last Friday, they finally pulled out the PICC line out of my right bicep. It was a very strange experience, it didn’t hurt really, but you could feel the tube moving under your skin which was not a feeling I’d like to duplicate often. I was more than a little happy to have it gone as that line had been nothing but trouble for me.

Now, I am back to going to the infusion center in order to get factor until a new port is put in. They had me go in twice over the weekend to ensure that I didn’t have a bleeding episode like I did the day after the operation. Outside of that, I am expecting to return to my once per week schedule I was on previously.

I honestly don’t expect to get a new port for at least a week still. It is hard to judge this as the doctor who is handling the case had a death in the family and has been gone for a week and a half. So I haven’t gotten solid word from anyone. However, looking at the site and kind of judging on the nurse’s reactions, I am guessing it is a good month out at least. I am still trying to decide if I really should try to put one in on my left hand side instead of my right so this break may do me good.