My Home Health Medical Team

For those of you who are interested this is a picture of my wound vac. Please keep in mind that the following may be a bit more information that some of you may want, so please have the children leave the room. The way it works is that this piece of rather ugly looking gray sponge is inserted into the wound. The nurse cuts it to the proper shape and to fit just inside, leaving a bit of room between the sponge and the wound itself. Then she puts on this large piece of "drape", a clear plastic film that looks like clear shelf paper with the adhesive on the back - the kind that you pull the edge of the adhesive off as you apply the film. This goes all around the wound covering most of my abdomen to form a complete seal. She then cuts a hole in the center and puts in this round disk with plastic tubing attached which is then connected to the machine. There is a canister attached to the rear of the machine which collects the drainage coming out of the wound. The machine is then turned on with the amount of suction selected on the readout, it starts sucking and then continues all day long (and all night), 24 hours a day.The cats love it, as it makes this burping noise everytime it sucks up stuff, providing hours of continous entertainment for them as they watch the little dabs of "stuff" pass thru the tubing.
The whole concept is very cool and makes sense and whoever invented this deserves to be the millionare they probably are. I was told that this machine usually cuts healing time in HALF. AMAZING, to say the least.
So I continue to carry around my little device until I'm all healed up. At first this was a REAL challange because I would spring a leak in the suction and the machine would sound this loud alarm to indicate that something was wrong. Then my canister filled up and I had to change it out, which is really very simple except that the 1st nurse who came to hook me up neglected to show me how to do this. Anyway, it's fine. We get along well but I can't wait until I'm done with it and can kick it to the curb.