What is Going On

I had the PICC line in place for the next six weeks as I needed to have at least a six week course of the antibiotic. The nurse was right when she told me that after doing the medication a few times that it would end up being something that I wouldn't really need to think about doing. Meanwhile I was still using the Wound VAC.

Everything seemed to be going really well as I adjusted to using the PICC, I was at this point pretty much used to the Wound VAC so I was in a relatively decent place mentally. It was approximately the beginning of October at this point, I was told that as long as the Wound VAC was on and that I remembered not to lift anything weighing more than a gallon of milk that I could pretty much be up and out of bed once in awhile. While I was happy that I could be vertical more often I pretty much only allowed myself up when I deemed it absolutely necessary. I was beginning to get somewhat down about the entire situation and so I figured that if in essence grounding myself was going to make it heal that that was what I was going to do.

After I was on the antibiotics for the full six weeks my blood tests were showing that the infection had improved so much that the PICC line could be removed. The infectious disease doctor removed it, during one of my regular wound care appointments. Removing it was absolutely painless and it was completely out in less than a minute.

I would remain on the Wound VAC from that point all the way into the second week of January. In January I woke up to go to my normal wound care appointment with the surgeon, the car ride up was fine, except for the weird pit in my stomach. I had no evidence that anything was wrong other than just a weird feeling in my gut.

It turns out that when the surgeon started poking around he felt something sticking up in the center. He explained that he thought it was only a bone spur but that he wanted me to get an X-ray before I left. I was placed back on the wound VAC and sent down for the x-ray with the expectation that the surgeon would call me in a couple days to tell me everything was fine. I was hoping that a positive outlook was going to help. A couple of days later came the highly anticipated call, unfortunately the pictures were obstructed by a different unrelated procedure that I had when I was very young. The obstructed view meant that I would now need to undergo a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). I knew from past experience that while an MRI was going to be a loud and probably lengthy test I knew that it was completely painless so I went ahead and scheduled the test for after my wound care appointment the following week.

The test was done and I would end up getting the results during my visit with my surgeon. He said that he could not be positive that there was or was not an infection in the bone so he wanted to do another surgery so we would know what we were dealing with.