To look at me you wouldn't think anything is wrong, this is typical for many Lymes patients.
It is now hard to remember what feeling good is like. When I wake in the morning I think I might be getting better and plan for my day - then around 10-11am I still need to lay down or take a nap for a few hours this is so unlike me. I use to get up at 3:00 am in the morning to start work creating my DVDs or painting, then from 6-10am I would do my morning chores then paint again for the rest of the day. This all feels so foreign to have had to slow down so much, I realize I am lucky and am doing amazingly well for having such a low CD57 count I could be in much worse shape.
I felt better before I started the antibiotics, until the next big thing happened but this is all typical part of the healing process.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Things to know about a Pic-line
I found out a few things about the Pic-line today that would have been nice to know sooner and will hopefully be helpful to anyone else who gets one of these.
The clamp was getting very uncomfortable so a few weeks ago so I asked the nurse if she could cut it off - no problem- the next nurse that did my dressing change made it very clear that it was not a good idea because if the cleave broke I could bleed to death (nice to know). It is extremely rare, I then said to her that I had the special line that has a valve on the internal end, she then told me that this kind of IV line has only been out for about 6 months and should work fine - but did I want experiment with it. No.
The other thing she said is after doing the saline push at the end of each treatment try not push the syringe all the way down, try to leave a 1/4 inch of solution in the syringe because this prevents creating an airlock, if an airlock exists this can create a problem leaving one end open where the blood could back into.
I asked her what were the benefits for a slow push of the antibiotic, she said because it is very irritating to the veins, so a slow dilution is much better.
In general the pic-line is easy to live with, if you have it for awhile the the skin can become a little irritated so ask the nurse when having the to dressing change to go slowly or it may tear the skin a little.
When taking a shower in general they say use plastic wrap and tape, (but this is time consuming and leaves lots of tiny areas for water to seep into) for some reason they don't promote pic-line covers much. But I have to say the cover has given me just a bit of freedom back and well worth looking into. You can find this on my links section.
The clamp was getting very uncomfortable so a few weeks ago so I asked the nurse if she could cut it off - no problem- the next nurse that did my dressing change made it very clear that it was not a good idea because if the cleave broke I could bleed to death (nice to know). It is extremely rare, I then said to her that I had the special line that has a valve on the internal end, she then told me that this kind of IV line has only been out for about 6 months and should work fine - but did I want experiment with it. No.
The other thing she said is after doing the saline push at the end of each treatment try not push the syringe all the way down, try to leave a 1/4 inch of solution in the syringe because this prevents creating an airlock, if an airlock exists this can create a problem leaving one end open where the blood could back into.
I asked her what were the benefits for a slow push of the antibiotic, she said because it is very irritating to the veins, so a slow dilution is much better.
In general the pic-line is easy to live with, if you have it for awhile the the skin can become a little irritated so ask the nurse when having the to dressing change to go slowly or it may tear the skin a little.
When taking a shower in general they say use plastic wrap and tape, (but this is time consuming and leaves lots of tiny areas for water to seep into) for some reason they don't promote pic-line covers much. But I have to say the cover has given me just a bit of freedom back and well worth looking into. You can find this on my links section.
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