PIC it up!

I started feeling less than great on about New Year's Eve.  The 4th and 5th of January I felt downright lousy.  The 6th I felt fine.  I woke up on the 7th with a fever.  Regardless of taking a small dose of Tylenol, I just felt worse and the fever kept rising.  Mid-afternoon the doctor said to rest and hydrate.  By 7 PM, I was starting to become incoherent.  The doctor's office then said to get to Sioux Falls to be admitted.  My blood had an elevated white count, so we started IV antibiotics.  I felt pretty good the next morning, but had another paracentesis to remove 9.3 pounds of fluid.  Fat Albie weighs 398 pounds.  What had happened?  Sepsis.

What is sepsis?  Here is about the easiest definition:


Sepsis

Sepsis is an illness in which the body has a severe response to bacteria or other germs.

This response may be called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS).


Causes

The symptoms of sepsis are not caused by the germs themselves. Instead, chemicals the body releases cause the response. A bacterial infection anywhere in the body may set off the response that leads to sepsis. 

So after a week in the hospital being blasted with antibiotics, I get to do ten days of IV infusion antibiotics at the local hospital.  It only takes about half an hour, but the PIC line hurts.  The insertion point is sore, and the adhesive is burning and blistering my skin.  The first night I had a major bleed from it, and had to have the dressing changed after one day.  That hurts, too.  I've found that if I use Coban to wrap the lumen to my arm so it doesn't move, it hurts less.  Woke up when the recycled Coban from earlier in the day came unwrapped, so now it is wrapped in Angry Birds Coban.   The PIC line is inserted on the under side of my right arm, runs up the arm and across the chest to the area near the heart.  What is weird is that I can sometimes feel where it is.

 The dressing pulls my skin so badly that it looks like I have wrinkly old lady or

elephant skin.  We change it again the 21st, then hopefully remove it the 23rd.

 I have a feeling I will be using lots of hand sanitizer to get the adhesive off, which will likely burn like a son of a gun.  Maybe lotion will work, too.

In better news, Avera McKennan is apparently close to submitting their application to UNOS for approval as a liver transplant center.  That would be awesome, so we wouldn't have to travel back to Milwaukee.  It would also be much less stressful to be closer to home.  So cross your fingers and anything else that you can safely cross.