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Old Mon Mar 24, 2014, 07:33 PM
Chirley Chirley is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Logan City Australia
Posts: 1,100
Want advice for Portocath

I had a portocath inserted just over 6 years ago. It has been excellent.

The last few months it has been more difficult for the nurses to place the needle because they say the port has started "moving" and is now on an angle. It took four attempts last week before they had success.

As well as this, sometimes it's very hard to flush my port and the back pressure causes the IV pump to keep alarming. I have had to start doing things like lying very still flat on my back for many hours at a time just so it won't make the pump alarm.

Well, last week when I arrived home from having spent 5 days in hospital, I realised that the needle was still in my port and that the port had not been flushed with Heparin. I waited until yesterday morning (Monday) and presented to the nearest hospital ED to have my port Heparin locked and the needle removed.

At first the nurses couldn't flush anything through the needle so they got a doctor who used a small 2ml syringe (I heard them say they weren't permitted to use any syringe smaller than 10mls on a central line) to apply extra pressure and after a lot of attempts she finally flushed 2 mls of saline through the port. When she tried to flush it again with a 10ml syringe it still wouldn't flush. So she gave up and pushed through (using a lot of effort) 2 mls of Heparin and took the needle out.

I won't need to use my port again for at least six weeks (hopefully) and I'm concerned that it wasn't flushed or locked properly and it will be blocked. The nurses did discuss using blood clot busting drugs on it at one stage but I think that they were busy and were happy when the doctor managed to force two mls through and decided to accept that as good enough.

I love my port.

Should I ask my regular hospital and nurses to re flush it just to be safe? It's a bit difficult at the moment because my doctor is in Nice on an Auto Immune conference and I don't know who's covering for him.
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