The Line

I woke up and I knew immediately that the line had gone bad. My arm was not a swollen mess of spilled antibiotic, it merely felt a little painful in the little wrong. It was a month after my accident and several days after surgery to correct an infection in the original wound. I was on the surgical floor on Memorial Day weekend, the surgery having taken place late on Friday. I had to have infusions of two antibiotics several times every day.

Immediately after the surgery it was known that I would be taking antibiotics for a long time. I ended up taking the intravenous antibiotics for almost 6 weeks. It was also well known to the surgery team that when a patient needs to take antibiotics for that long the proper approach is to put in a central line called a PICC line. This line is placed into a deep vein and ends up relatively near the heart. These lines can last for months with relatively minor care and almost never go bad. There was one small problem, this was Labor Day weekend and it would be four days before the team that placed a PICC line would be available.

So for four days I had to receive numerous infusions in lines that were stuck in my peripheral veins. The problem was that these peripheral infusions never lasted very long. I had no needle in a vein which could remain viable for longer than a day and a significant number lasted a much shorter period of time. This raised another problem, finding the best expert to try and insert a new line.

There is a general rule that when you want something done and this can be almost anything the best thing to do is to find somebody who does it every day many times each day and choose them. These people will always do a better job than others who like The task only rarely. Thus, if you want somebody to draw a blood sample from you, the best person to ask is a phlebotomist who does nothing else all day but draw blood samples.

I rapidly discovered that bedside nurses were not particularly experienced at placing intravenous lines. I had a particularly bad experience one night when two nurses took three tries to place an intravenous line and almost failed on the third time about the time I was willing to send them away and take my chances on anyone else.

As my lines started going bad, I tried to learn the best nurses for placing new lines. There was one angel, and Ethiopian nurse called Heba who had a particular skill and whenever she was on duty I insisted that she be the one to replace my line. When this was not possible I asked for the best expert that the nurses had. He came in, he tried, and he failed and after that he went off to look for an even better expert.

I believe that during the four days between my surgery and the time that the central line was finally inserted I had at least five the intravenous lines put in at a cost of significant pain and trouble.

Once the central line was installed, it worked perfectly and both the nurses and I, since once I went home I was placed in charge of infusing my own drugs. The line lasted six weeks and was removed only when for other reasons I was placed on oral antibiotic. Okay