All the lovely things...

Now for the pictures of all the lovely things that I needed to take care of my now deceased PICC line.

This is me in the mask I wore for every dressing change. My nurse had to wear one too.

These are the masks before being warn, all flat and what not. The box said that different colours are available, but my box only had green...

 

       The sterile towel that everything needed for a dressing change would be placed on. This thing was huge!

The sterile towel itself, only partially unfolded.

Below is the Statlock used to secure the PICC line to me arm. The nurse always had a lot of trouble getting it of, and more than once pulled off a bit of skin. on the left is the Statlock in its sterile package. On the right it is unwrapped, and the little package was the skin prep which, I think, was meant to make it less sticky and to protect the skin.

This is the Chloraprep used to clean my arm every week. At first I had ones with red curves on the packaging. They contained alcohol which stung badly, so we switch to these with the back curve - non-alcoholic.

Above are picture of the tegaderm dressing that would cover the PICC line at all times. It wasn't allowed to get wet at all... kinda hard when it is really hot and you start to sweat. The white strip around the whole thing comes off after it is out on your arm, and the strips at the side came off to secure the actual tubing to your arm.

Below is the tubing, which was changed every three days. At one point they accidentally ordered me the wrong size tubing. The nurse thought it would be o.k. but I woke up at 6:50 am to the alarm of the IV pump. Because the tubing was bigger and took more to prime (meaning getting a vacuum/all the air out of it before connecting it the the PICC line, and technically me) the 500ml bag of antibiotics I got everyday wouldn't last the 24 hours it needed to. Thankfully the nurse had extra smaller tubing in he car, and by the next tubing change day I had been given the right stuff.

It was very long, which was great when I was sitting on my bed and wanted to hope over to the bookcase in my room, but when I went out it had a life of it's own. It would sneak out of the bag and I would find it randomly trailing on the ground behind me. I gave up after a while and just held onto the excess, playing with it.

The connecter piece which connected my PICC  to the tubing. This often got stuck and we had to use pliers to get it off occasionally...

Gauze padding, used to wrap around the connecter piece/end of my PICC so that they would be more comfortable against my skin, and less affected by the tape holding the tube to my arm.

Alcohol swabs used to clean the connecter piece every time I got a new IV bag (aka every morning, and in between the saline flushes. Basically, disconnect tubing and swab, flush first saline syringe and swab, flush second saline syringe and swab, reconnect tubing, and swab).

Saline syringes to flush the line. This was supposed to be done everyday, but one nurse refused. We eventually just started doing it ourselves along with everything except the dressing changes. BTW my lovely mom did everything for me! It is kind of hard to do for yourself.  I had to laugh so hard when I saw that the plastic wrap around each syringe had instruction in Dutch as well as English and several other languages, since I am from the Netherlands.

Alost everything needed for one tubing change and one dressing change. There should be a few more saline syringes, sterile gloves, and regular gloves. I think that's about it. Oh wait, the actual medication itself. And my badger of course! To bad I am not a Hufflepuff.

I should note, that the actual items shown here were not used. I photographed all this after my PICC line was taken out. If I actually still needed all this stuff I would only have taken pictures of unopened packages.