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.
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