Tuesday 2014-04-01
Yesterday when I got home after dialysis I was totally
beaten, I had a headache, felt nauseous and tired. Even resting couldn’t return
my energy, but a forced down sandwich with a large portion of ham helped a bit.
As my arm felt still sore and heavy from Friday’s injection,
I thought better take a look. The needle point and its vicinity was bruised, from
one single red spot of Saturday to a huge patch of redness, the upper arm was
hard and swollen as if I were hit by a bat.
the blue dot at the top is injection point
10 minutes later I was in the emergency room. Registrar E
felt my right arm and left arm and left and right again and again, and said there
was a 50% chance of some kind of infection which was called Cellulitis and 50%
chance it was a delayed drug reaction. I told him my other two hepatitis B vaccine
injection didn’t gave me any delayed reaction at all and he went away to
consult some renal people for my condition and drug dose.
In the end he gave me a packet of Flucloxacillin, a letter
to my dialysis training unit and sent me home. I may hold on to the letter
myself, as they are the people who sent me to the emergency in the first place
and their changes to my treatment made me suffer more after dialysis, I’m quite
scared of their creativity and fanciful minds.
Obviously the drug was effective, few hours later the bruise
mollified down a little, I continued with the medicine. This morning the
swollen was gone, the bruise dulled down a shade, the sore and heaviness would
take a few more days to heal.
About 10 days ago, on Wednesday, 19th March after
dialysis I also ended up in the same emergency room. My wound from previous day’s
operation oozed blood, within half an hour from a single red spot to one side
of the dressing darkened.
Inadvertently I must
somehow graze my wound while dialysing and the heparin I received on the machine
made it worse. Holding my forearm and hand upright I was in the emergency
within 10 minutes.
Neither the triage nurse nor the doctor dared to touch my
dressing soon as they learned my wound was the result of previous day’s
operation. The doctor consulted the vascular registrar who operated me and
decided to send me home without doing anything saying things to the effect that
unless the whole dressing was soaked and worse, don’t come back.
The bleeding temporarily slowed with my arm holding upwards,
I was tired and my arm turned horizontal with which the bleeding came back. I
called access nurse M who gave me her 24 hour number, who told me pressing my
hand on the wound which I did for 20 minutes and it worked.
We all heard of the phrase “put pressure on the wound when
bleeding” a thousand times, neither the emergency people nor the surgeon did
this. When I told doctor L that my up held arm seemed helped a bit, she said, “Well,
then keep on doing that”.
I delayed my hospital visit for more than 20 years, no GPs
either, rarely taken medicine, eventually I ended up in the emergency and found
I only got 3% kidney function left. In the past half a year, I made 5 emergency
trips, 1st one was too late and the rest I went as soon as possible.
The other 2 emergencies, aside from the above mentioned ones,
one was my catheter was not properly dressed which resulted minor infection of
the wound and other one was my jaw bled continuously due to overdosed heparin
for a period of time which lead to platelet count dropping 50% within 20 days and
APPT reading was 96 seconds.
The emergency trips are a bit much for me. I don’t have the
intention to start a blog for "Emergency Day". Imagine how long would that last.
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