Feeling pretty crap today. Can’t sleep and way too much pain round the clock.
Since the turn of the year I’ve had no trouble getting to sleep – staying asleep is a whole different ball game. I’ve not slept for more than an hour at a stretch, and often only half an hour. Add in the almsot constant pain,and I’m in grave danger of becoming unravelled
New nurse on Wednesday (think I might have seen her once before), said she was going to tell GP he had Continue reading
Yep, it’s official, it can be healed. The nurses brought their resident expert with them today. The first thing I learned is that terminology in general use is so tightly focused in their field as to have effectively lost its original meaning.
Take “necrotic” – it simply means dead – dead tissue in a medical context (in the context of Tory politicians it’s the tissue between their ears). However, in the context of lymphoedema it is tightly tied to one specific type of tissue found in wounds.
This must surely cause confusion when they discuss patients with, say, GPs, and it could be dangerous to the patient if there’s misunderstanding.
Anyway – long story short – I have Continue reading
Interim dressing change due to swelling and severe pain.
No discernible problems except the old dressing was stuck insanely hard (took half an hour to soak the bugger off), which was causing the pain, due to nurses refusal to use Continue reading
The new treatment for my leg is going well…
I know some of the following has already been said, but not everyone reads every post so some repetition is necessary for clarity.
As you can see from the following pics, my use of wet dressings over the weekend (Aquacel Ag plus sterile normal saline solution, as recommended in the PIL), is having a beneficial effect on my lesions. The first pic is last Monday’s, the other is from this morning, after Continue reading
My big problem, with the nurses coming only twice a week now, is that the dressings weld themselves to the lesions so tightly that, when they are removed, the healing process is massively disrupted. Even soaking in warm water isn’t a total solution (no pun intended).
However, when I bought my own supply of Aquacel Ag dressings, I finally got Continue reading
I was poking about in the photos on my Galaxy S3, couldn’t find the one I wanted, but I stumbled upon this that I’d totally forgotten about (warning, gross! – don’t Continue reading
No, not my right leg, that’s still progressing nicely – and reasonably pain-free.
This is my healed left leg, and now it’s taken against me. Last week the nurses’ manager agreed with me that the tubular bandage should be left off as it was doing nothing useful.
Wrong.
What it was doing – keeping Continue reading
Despite dire prognostications from the staff nurse (I use that term as the post seems to be analogous to that in a hospital – I don’t know if it’s the correct title for a community nurse), that my lesions will never heal without compression, the evidence – in a mere four days – speaks for itself. The swelling continues to diminish, too – my right foot is now almost as small as my left. A few more days, and with appropriate wound protection, and socks, I might just be able to wear boots again.
This is the last pic, from last Thursday:- Continue reading
Again, much improved. The smallest of the lesions has now scabbed over, and the two larger ones are, again, appreciably less deep. Continue reading
And it wasn’t all good news.
The remaining lesions are, apparently, baby ulcers (personally, not convinced – we’ll see), for which the only cure is allegedly compression. Bearing in mind the biggest “ulcer” is 1.6cm across at its widest point (and that, frankly, is a very generous measurement as all of them cover an area less than 5cm square!), and the rest are much smaller, compression means wrapping my leg, tightly and painfully, in four layers of unyielding bandage and padding from toes to groin.
Given that for Continue reading
Ron's Rants... 