Half the Energy, Twice the Spunk

Well at 11am this morning things were looking fantastic. TPN training was going beautifully, and the nurse announced I could get discharged on Friday.
Supplies were delivered to the house for home TPN. Discharge papers were drawn up. Follow up appointments were being lined up. Life was looking pretty peachy.

Then by 12:30 pm I was diagnosed with a central line tunnel infection, plans were being drawn up to pull my central line and maybe try replacing it with a PICC line, they decided they have to start me on an antibiotic that I'm severely allergic to (IV Vancomycin), since it's the only one appropriate which means they would have to pretreat me with IV benadryl which according to my body is like extremely potent LSD and renders me a useless jibbering pile of nonsense for 6 hours.

Discharge plans turned to smoke.

Throw in the fact that Dave spent the day at home quite sick with a GI virus, and it just rounded out the day quite nicely.

So yea.

The infection I have is not in the blood yet (that we know of - blood cultures are pending), but rather is in the tunnel that my central line goes through from where it goes into my skin, to where it enters my large blood vessel. The point of a tunneled line like this is so that there is some space from the site where the line enters the body to where it enters the blood vessels, so if there is an infection, it has some space between the exit site and the blood vessel. So in that respect the tunnel did work well - it gave us time to catch and respond to the infection before it made it to my blood stream and got really serious.

The down side is the vast majority of the time, tunnel infections aren't treated in a way to save the line - usually the line is pulled and the infection cleared before a new line is placed (new surgery, new site).



So at about 2pm this afternoon I was prettty furious with the whole situation. It feels like we get 1 step forward and slide 2 steps back every time we try to make progress and it was getting very frustrating.



Since then things have gone a little smoother. My first dose of Benadryl and Vancomycin went very well and I didn't react at all to the Vanco. The benadryl, as usual, stoned me up good, and after a nice fun trip for an hour or so I passed out cold until a little after 6:30pm. Aside from horrible zombie dreams (seriously vivid... not cool) it was a good nap and I woke up in a bit of a better place.

the plan now is that Infectious Diseases will come assess me tommorrow hopefully and make a decision on whether or not to pull the central line. If they do pull it, I will likely have a PICC line placed tommorrow to take it's place. If they don't pull it, then we will hope the abx clear the infection and play it by ear.

In the meantime none of this necessarily writes off my chances of a Friday discharge. I will still need IV antibiotics twice a day, but I could theoretically go back and forth to the local hospital for those once I"m discharged.

At this point it's all very much in the air - which I don't do well with - emotionally I need a plan so I can just relax.

But I'm learning to be 'ok' with not having a plan. I realise sometimes there isn't one and that has to be manageable too.

Trying very hard to be 'Zen' about it all.


Any way I cut it, it sucks big time.

But it could always be worse.

K