Surpise visit from the awesome foursome sisters today
I've been busy battling the bugs with my white army of knights and our antibiotic weapons of mass destruction. What a 24 hours! The last I posted was breaking news of an abscess bursting through flappy which was very dramatic and reminded me of that first time I met flappy in the mirror. I thought he was like a volcano going off. Well flappy erupted the other night and there was golden lava flowing down my neck. I took a picture but it's way too gross to post! I was so happy to see it I was fist pumping. With all that gunk out of the way the antibiotics have been able to really get in an do the job.
On closer inspection the breaking point is in the non-flappy part, normal skin, right on the edge of the flap. I had an ultrasound done yesterday to try to find the collection of pus beneath the hole and measure how much is there. In ultrasounds, liquid is dark and air shows up as white but so does metal and bone. With my abnormal neck structure there's lots of calcified tissue from radiation damage which we know looks like bony bits so this confuses the interpretation of the scan. So we were on the fence with the results. Today I had a CT scan with a transfer dye to help show up the bony bits. So I did the easy bit, just lying down for a wee while, and now the Docs have to do the jigsaw. I'm hoping that these images will help them determine if its ironic or not!
This is what I'm gathering from the various conversations and musings over the last 24 hours. There are two options that could have caused this infection. Either, one of the sutures/stitches has become infected or, there is a deeper infection possibly involving the bone (spine or jaw) which may have always been there or could've been introduced at surgery. If it's the bone option then it's ironic and I'm likely to be on the IV antibs for a while longer and it could recur periodically. If it's sutures then it's likely I'll go straight to oral antibiotics for a few weeks. So this is a big jigsaw puzzle to sort out for the docs and will be the basis of my get out of jail plan.
One other thing I've been struggling with in here has been the lines or candulas. The antibs are pretty rough on the veins so the IV lines don't last too long before they become too painful and need to come out. I'm on my fourth one in 5 days! A100ml of the good stuff is getting put through the line every 6 hours, however almost one a day is madness Ted. There were a couple of failed attempts too which meant we were running out of decent easy to find veins. Anybody feeling faint yet? So the last three lines were put in by an anaesthetist. One used ultrasound to find the vein! I never knew you could do that! And the speed and confidence of these guys is just incredible. They must do it in their sleep. They're like robots. Somehow I managed to rip the last line out of my arm today and didn't know I was bleeding out until the nurse came to give me a dose of antibs! Oops! No idea how I managed that but I felt bad about it. I'd just been for the CT scan and they used the same line for the dye, it's ok that's SOP apparently. It was checked and fine afterwards. I must've pulled it out with the sleeve of my pjs. Oops! Back down to Anaesthesia! I brought sweets this time to bribe them! "You're welcome anytime" he said, "hopefully I won't be taking you up on that offer" says me.
So the morning ward round should be interesting. Should get the swab results from the lava, should get the CT findings and hopefully the docs will have pulled an all nighter and finished the puzzle, come up with a plan to get me out of here! I bet there's one piece missing........
No comments:
Post a Comment