My wife's niece had a chronic foot wound last year that over several months really didn't respond to wound care. Ultimately it turned out to be sarcoma, although the doctors thought they had ruled out cancer.
She died suddenly in April. They didn't discover the cancer until the autopsy.
Routine heparin infusions into PICCs and other peripheral venous access is deprecated; the increased risk of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia or other heparin reactions outweighs the benefits, which turn out not to exist - heparinized lines are just as likely to clot as saline-locked ones.
Oy! Yeah, I was wondering about all that heparin. Maybe I should just not use it. Each of the two input lines (or whatever the jargon is) of the PICC is getting a saline flush daily and the one that gets the antibiotic gets another saline flush afterwards. (I alternate, red-labeled line on odd days, blue on even, though I doubt it matters.)
They were using heparin in the hospital on the usual short-term IV lines and it seemed to cause no trouble, mind.
Your Foot Infx
anonymous
December 28 2009, 14:26:59 UTC
Your doctor should be treating a specific organisim. You need a bone biopsy to confirm the infection and identify the organisim. The MRI is only a pre liminary test to show changes in the bone consistent with an infection.
Re: Your Foot InfxgooleyDecember 28 2009, 17:32:05 UTC
I don't think that there's been a bone biopsy... maybe the foot surgeon did one when probing the stub of the toe -- I wasn't watching closely -- but I don't think so. The culture taken when I was put in hospital showed nothing particularly tenacious, but I left the hospital with the infected toe looking much as it had when I went in. It looks somewhat better now but still not very encouraging, at least not to me.
I'm always a little leery of podiatrists. When I was a pre-med, the pre-meds going to podiatry school were invariably the ones who couldn't make it into medical school...
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She died suddenly in April. They didn't discover the cancer until the autopsy.
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Just FYI.
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They were using heparin in the hospital on the usual short-term IV lines and it seemed to cause no trouble, mind.
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Dave
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I'm always a little leery of podiatrists. When I was a pre-med, the pre-meds going to podiatry school were invariably the ones who couldn't make it into medical school...
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