Early Christmas Gift

Post date: Dec 12, 2009 5:26:11 AM

Connor's central line has been removed!!!!! YAY!

As we shared in September, his TPN was stopped and we've been monitoring how well he's doing without this IV nutrition. The central line was kept just in case we had to put him back on any IV stuff. However since we finished his last set of antibiotics from the September hospital stay and after, we have had to do little with his central line except flush it daily with heparin to keep the line from clotting and change the dressing around the site weekly. We didn't know how long he would have to do well without the TPN before he could get the central line removed; we had hoped it would be before the holidays. But of course Connor couldn't leave this to the whims of others. He had to take action himself to preempt things...

On Thanksgiving Day we found a tear on his line [*dramatic music*] When else would we have a Connor drama but on a holiday when all the doctors' offices are closed for the weekend? Other events have usually occurred on a weekend and/or late in the evenings/wee hours of the morning.

His central line comprised of a thin rubbery plastic tubing that covered an even smaller rubbery plastic tubing that was the actual IV line. The outer sheathing was completely torn and we could see the exposed inner line. This freaked us out a bit because if his line was to break, he would be at risk for bleeding out. We debated whether to take him to the ER that night. However, his inner line seemed fine and we didn't want to expose him to the winter yuckies that would be around in the hospital. We called Home Health and spoke with the on-call nurse. She pretty much told us to use our judgement as there weren't any visible leaks. We decided to wait. Friday we called the surgeon's office and found that they wouldn't be open until Monday. Monday we called and the earliest they could get us in was Tuesday. In the meantime, we kept the line tightly taped (Connor likes to tug.) and clamped it above the tear point.

When the surgeon saw him on Tuesday, to our surprise he told us the line could be fixed with a repair kit. However, the repair kit wasn't stocked in the satellite office we had our appointment in. We would need to go to the main office downtown with another appointment to get that. We suggested that he probably didn't need his line any longer as it has been two months since he quit TPN. The surgeon called our GI doctor and, sure enough, she said the line could come out.

So Mr. Surgeon came back in and told us he could pull out the line.

"Pull the line? Okay, what arrangements to we need to make?" we asked naively, thinking it would require a special room, equipment or at the very least another appointment.

The answer, "Oh, I can pull it right here now."

And so that's what he did. He literally put one hand on Connor's chest and held the line with his other hand and, you got it, pulled. And the line came out. Applied pressure on the wound where the line had entered his body and put some gauze and tape on and, wah lah! No more central line.

(What about that risk for bleeding out and all, you ask, since the surgeon just yanked it out in the examining room? Well, apparently it's a real risk but since his line is so small it would have probably clotted before he lost too much blood, especially now that his clotting factors are much better. Same time last year, he was receiving platelet transfusions because he wasn't clotting.)

Yes, Connor cried when he pulled it out, but only for a few minutes. Mr. Surgeon didn't say it felt like a stubbed toe this time, but it was something similar to that in pain equivalence according to reports from other older children who can report on such matters.

After he stopped crying, Connor merely looked mildly offended but was willing to forgive and forget. We left the office with one less hole in Connor's body and the opportunity to finally take a real bath, submerged in water and everything!

Since then, he's had a bath, but not the big production I was envisioning. The whole household had been sick since Thanksgiving and we just stayed sick for a while. Too long for Connor to wait on a "big production" bath. We'll do that one later, I guess. I don't think he'll mind. :-)