The story of two thousand

I use a variety of medical supplies in order to apply the dressing around my pin sites. My stash or, rather my hoard of medical supplies includes sterile woven sponges, sterile non-woven sponges (two different sizes), non-sterile gauze, sterile water, alcohol wipes, hydrogen peroxide, suture kits (for the scissors), hand sanitizers, and lots of medical tape (my nurses get me the nice pre-perforated stuff).

My hoard of supplies also includes cotton tipped applicators. I use quite a few of these on any given day, depending on how gunky my pin sites are or if I need to do more than one dressing change per day.

I do dressing changes on a daily basis, so you can only imagine how many supplies I got through or, I suppose, what the garbage man would think if he knew what was inside my trash bin. The vast majority of my supplies are provided by my home care nurses, without any cost to me. This is wonderful because I do not have to order thing (or pay for them!), or have the hassle of remembering when I will run out of individual items.

There is one item, however, that my mum and I order ourselves. I am talking about cotton tipped applicators. In other terms, an over-sized Q-tip on a giant stick. And this is where we get to the story of the two thousand. Before I was discharged from the hospital after surgery number five, the hospital staff showed me how to do my own dressing changes. The lovely nurses on the orthopedic ward used these handy cotton tipped applicators to clean the gunk from my pin sites (much easier than trying to shove some gauze, let alone a finger) around the fixator to get at the pins. I was not expecting the home care nurses to provide these for me so I was pleasantly surprised when I found about a dozen of them in a wound care kit that ended up being sent with the rest of my supplies. My nurses, mum and I were thrilled to have these because it made my pin sites much easier to access. The first few days we eagerly used them, one applicator per pin. Using one item per pin site is standard practice because doing so helps avoid cross contamination between pin sites. Imagine that one pin gets infected. I use an applicator or another item to clean the pin, therefore picking up bacteria. I then use that bacteria laden item to clean another pin, thus spreading a potential source of infection. Now imagine that I already have an established infection in one pin site! So one over-sized Q-tip per pin site it was. Except we only had a limited number of packages, two applicators per package. This left us with enough applicator for twelve day. No worries. Just order more supplies, right? Wrong! You are only allowed to order more supplies every two weeks. In the meantime, one of my nurses said she would order us more supplies and that we could poor some hydrogen peroxide into a cup, dip the applicator in it, use it to clean one pin site, and then repeat with the same applicator to clean another site. It is here that I should mention how great that nurse was, because she truly was, and we sadly no longer have her. But my mum and I were a bit baffled about her suggestion to reuse the applicator, given the whole cross contamination thing and all. The following day we addressed this idea with another nurse. She said that we could do it, but that she herself preferred one applicator per site, right along with my thinking. A day or so later, after making due with other supplies to clean the pin sites, my mum picked up my new box of supplies at the pharmacy. When she got home, I excitedly opened the box like a kid in a candy store to find only fourteen packs of applicators. That's right, fourteen packs times two applicators per pack is only enough to clean two pin sites a day for a fortnight, thus excluding the other two pins... What to do? It was clear that the nurse thought we would double dip the applicators as she had suggested.

Double dipping was not going to happen, not in this house. I have already lived with a bone infection for far too long (heck, amount of time is too long, not to mention nearly a decade). I'll be damned if I get another infection just because we were too stingy with supplies. Fortunately, my mum found the very same applicators on Amazon. And here is where, in my book, the story gets funny. A box of one hundred packs (two hundred applicators) costs roughly twenty five dollars, plus shipping and handling. Given that I was using two packs a day, we knew I would need way more than one box. So it would seem that the next best thing would be two but two boxes (two hundred packs; four hundred applicators). But good deals are not always what they seem to be. It turns out that for about fifty five bucks you can buy one thousand packs (two thousand applicators) with free shipping. Care to guess which offer we choose? So no I have ten boxes of six inch sterile cotton tipped applicators. Actually, nine boxes. I have already worked my way through one and have delved right on into a second box.

Because I now have so many applicators, I am free to use as few (well, no fewer than four) or many as I like. On a typical day, in which I only do one dressing change, I go through four packs, which is eight applicators. I use one applicator per actual pin site (the area where the pin comes into contact with my skin), and another for the rest of the pin, because the skin and gunk likes to ride up a bit each day, harden, and crust onto the pin. It can take some effort to get all the gunk off, so extra applicators come in handy. So it is clear that fourteen packs a day would not have been enough.

On top of that, some days I have to do extra dressing changes depending on how much my pin sites have leaked that day. With that in mind, fourteen packs per fortnight would definitely not have been enough. I am very fortunate to live in Canada, where OHIP foots the bill for all of the supplies I get through home care. Although I do wish that we would have gotten more applicators, I am not upset that we did not. Perhaps with a different nurse ordering the supplies we would have gotten more. But then, seeing how little out of pocket expenses we have had, it is no big deal for us to pay for the applicators ourselves. We are thankfully fortunate enough to be able to afford to do so. And this way I can use as many as is necessary, not as dictated by how many someone else orders for us. I should also add that we have not had any other issues with supplies and that all of the nurses I have seen this time around with home care have been absolutely amazing =)

And that is the story of the two thousand. Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the left over applicators once I no longer need them. Two thousand is definitely a large number. I will definitely get through at least six hundred of them, but two thousand? No way... XD