Two Steps Back

I think that I allowed the surgeon to go ahead and change my wound care because up until that point I had never really had an experience with a doctor being completely wrong about a course of treatment. Having said that, I ignored the warnings that my gut was sending me and went along with her plan to switch me off of the wound VAC and to let her prescribe wet to dry dressings, using a Dakin's solution.

Dakin's is a diluted bleach-like solution that in my case was supposed to be poured onto a gauze pad and then the gauze was supposed to be used to pack the wound. The idea of this is that as the solution is drying on the gauze any 'gunk' from the wound will stick to the gauze and then be removed the next time the gauze is replaced. The idea behind this 'mechanical debridement' is that by removing all of the unhealthy tissue and bacteria the wound bed will become more vital and able to regranulate better. The problem with it though is that there is no way to prevent the debridement from damaging healthy regranulating tissue. While this for the most part made sense to me I had a feeling that my wound was too deep to really get very shallow on its own and was mildly concerned that it would set back the healing instead of allowing it to progress.

When my visiting nurse came a few days later to change the dressing she expressed her concern that the doctor I was seeing didn't seem to be making much sense. While I agreed with my homecare nurse I still chose to continue seeing that doctor and following her instructions, much to the annoyance of my nurse. This is where I became my own worst enemy and just decided to be reactive to the situation and not proactive about any of it. My reaction to it was to just become potentially the most patient person on the planet. Despite the fact that I was beginning to truly believe that the doctor didn't know her Gluteous Maximus from her Humorous I continued to let her change the wound care instructions at will, and repeatedly kept telling my home care nurse to just give it a chance and to give my body time to heal. All that decision did was make a bad situation even worse.