mixed results

Dec 26, 2009 13:31

The stub of the toe wasn't getting any better. ( Read more... )

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frosch December 27 2009, 18:09:46 UTC
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.

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gooley December 27 2009, 22:58:41 UTC
Good heavens! Something that I guess I can't rule out, either...

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ikkyu2 December 28 2009, 06:31:36 UTC
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.

Just FYI.

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gooley December 28 2009, 17:05:48 UTC
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.

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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.

Dave

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Re: Your Foot Infx gooley December 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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