Another Port For Me

CONTENT WARNING: Visible surgical wounds and a blood mention. Some minor visible blood in my images. Simply navigate away now if those things will upset you. Nobody is making you scroll down. I would rather you be safe than read my blog post and feel upset. If you want to read: read onwards.

New Port! New port install. And here I am at the hospital, after going through the surgery and making it out OK. Huzzah! It’s been a rough several weeks dealing with my new PICC Line, but it wasn’t supposed to be for too long, and this past Friday, I got my port replaced. Thing is, I was supposed to have the PICC Line removed at the same time, and I didn’t. After I got all the way down there, and went through a bunch of confusion, we learned I was gonna be keeping the PICC Line until the port was for sure for sure safe and working OK. At least a week or two. I guess that’s cool logically. In practice it’s a little more annoying than I had hoped for. I was dying to get my PICC out and had set out pajamas with long sleeves for my triumphant return home. (I guess you could wear long sleeves with a PICC, but they recommend not doing it, and it was really annoying to do when I tried.) Well, I guess that had to wait a little bit.

I’m supposed to be changing the dressing on this thing every two days, and that’s all well and good. Super fine and all. The first dressing change I barely made it because they didn’t have my normal dressing at the hospital and I was sooo itchy. I figured it was the dressing and the fact that they most likely did not use a skin prep on me when I was out. Cool, cool. But when we took the dressing off it looked like this:

I mean. There should be bruising. Ok. Cool. Yeah. But it’s red near the top incision site, and two days later it was still bleeding from both sites. It’s also kind of hard to tell from my picture, but, the glue they put on the top incision site is kind of.. Thin? Like it’s usually much thicker than this and that’s why we had thought maybe there was blood. But also: they don’t usually need steri-strips for this sort of surgery for me? Usually the glue is enough? I don’t know. But it wasn’t enough this time, and we didn’t worry too much about it.

We called up IR (which is so hit/miss) and they told me to put more steri-strips on it if I had those at home (Of course I have those at home. My house is practically a hospital. I have so much crap here..) and if that didn’t stop the bleeding to call back and they could get me a better dressing that would stop the bleeding. I mean, cool. That sounded reasonable enough. I called back when four days later, there was still blood on my gauze but not only that, I was also developing a blistering rash…

So this time. THIS TIME. I called back and the woman on the phone said to just come in, and they would just take the steri-strips off at my appointment to remove the PICC Line and they’d assess the port then and see if it was usable. I. No. I’m completely uncomfortable with that. I’m still bleeding and you wanna take the steri-strips off? I don’t know if the blistering rash is an allergy to the glue, the steri-strips, the port itself having an infection. I don’t know. But I know that taking the steri-strips off after only a week when it’s still bleeding is.. A terrible idea. Master Pravus isn’t really fond of the idea either and so we cancelled our appointment to remove the PICC and we’re waiting for a call back with a new appointment to remove it. We’re going to try to get someone else on the phone for better advice. As it is: I don’t know what’s going on with this thing but it’s not great and I don’t like it.

It sort of reminds me of the last port I had placed though. My skin wouldn’t come together due to an infection at the skin site (sigh) and I needed antibiotics to get better. But, it did clear up with a round of antibiotics. Overall, I don’t know if this is that or not. But I do know that whatever is going on is not great and Master Pravus and me don’t feel comfortable with “just come in and we’ll take off your steri-strips and look.” No thanks. We’re really not sure why they won’t see us for an office appointment to look at the thing and it’s come down to either a phone appointment, or a “we’ll take the strips off” appointment.

Anyway, I’m tired of letting people do ridiculous things to me and having it turn out stupid. So I won’t let them. I’ll update when I figure out what’s going on. Currently: eager to be rid of my PICC Line but trying so hard to make sure they’re doing the right thing. UGH.

So, one thing which always sucks balls about getting a new port is: I can’t wear my steel collar. Ordinarily, I would wear my red leather “travelling” collar which used to be my training collar. However, the top wound is still weeping blood and the collar would rub against that. We don’t want to risk it until the thing is healed enough to stop weeping, at least. (Fair enough, honestly.) But it sucks. I miss my collar and I wanna wear it!

So, in the meantime, Master Pravus put one of my steel wrist cuffs back on me. It’s not perfect but it’ll do for now. We don’t see wrist cuffs, even my steel ones, as a sign of his ownership. They’re more a play thing, and a fun high-quality piece of gear. But. They do lock, and the fact they lock and can be worn in the tubbie and no matter what I’m doing (unless steel is a problem in general, I mean..) is a plus. So I have this for now. And when my PICC Line comes out, if my wound isn’t healed enough for me to wear my old leather collar, we might put the other cuff on. I’ll have to see what Master Pravus says. But, in the meantime, I definitely like this better than nothing at all.