The insertion procedure was trivial and uneventful. We put Pablo to work right away and he's done a good job with the Adriamycin, Bleomycin and Vinblastin. DTIC is going in now and everything is running smoothly.
Some negatives of the PICC line:
- Have to flush it every day. This is pretty simple - hook up a couple of syringes like this one:
- push the solution - one saline, one heparin and we're good to go.
- And here is my super nurse that will be helping me with this:
- The other problem is that if you sweat (in my case, WHEN you sweat), you can get bugs under the dressing, which can travel in through the PICC line opening into your skin and cause an infection. And in the chemo world, infections are A Bad Thing. So we're going to get some Tegaderm and change the dressing after I exercise. The folks at the hospital suggested I just not sweat for 12 weeks which didn't seem like a very realistic plan. I'll get the dressing changed every Monday at the oncology center but in the interim after I exercise we can just remove the outer Tegaderm bandage, clean the site and replace it.
- I also got a pointer to DryPro, which provides a waterproof covering over the PICC line. Might be really useful for showering and may also allow me to swim, which would be very cool.
More than half way done!! That is a great milestone. Hopefully the WBC counts have stayed up since your post a few weeks back. Keep up the good fight.
ReplyDeleteYesssssss. Getting half way through something less than fun is for sure a major milestone. Here's hoping that the last half will go by uneventfully. Great work, Pops. Love you!
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