Joyce's KP Adventure mikepasini.com headlines
The Supplies Last
9 September 2021
Vic the LVN changed Joyce's dressing this morning. That concludes our in-home nursing for this round.
Tuesday we drove over to Kaiser's French Hospital campus for a drive-through Covid-19 test. Joyce tested negative.
She received an email asking her to be at the Geary hospital at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. That beats the original 5 a.m. time. She has to drink an energy drink two hours before, so that means she can have it at 7 a.m. instead of 3 a.m.
It also means surgery won't be until 11 a.m. or so. And that always depends on what else happens tomorrow.
There's just one more wet-to-dry dressing change to do before then. And we'll have enough supplies to do it.
We just barely had enough Dakin's Solution (the big white bottle in the photo) and we're nearly finished the little blue Vashe bottle. We have enough abdominal pads and gauze. And we have enough SurePrep skin wipes. You can see everything that goes into the dressing in the front right corner of the table.
When Vic left this morning we donated a case of tightly-wound gauze we never used and a large bag of small gauze. If Joyce returns with a Wound VAC, we may have a few more things to donate from these wet-to-dry dressing days.
I took a photo of the wound when Vic was changing the dressing this morning. It should look different after surgery.
But what I wanted to see was if I could detect any progress in the months we've been doing the wet-to-dry dressings.
I can see the skin has grown in a bit, making the wound slightly smaller. But I can also see the interior of the wound is much the same. It's this lack of healing that has prompted Dr. Tong to have Joyce return to the hospital for debridement and what she calls "exploration."
No doubt getting Joyce back on the Wound VAC is part of the scheme, too. The consensus of our nurses has been that the Wound VAC would speed tissue growth.
I'll let you know what happens right here shortly after I myself find out. Meanwhile let's all cross our fingers.
