[Camel Joe]

As one who nearly died of a staff infection from back surgery I can say with confidence that you are sadly mistaken. After discharge the wound became red around the edges 12 days out of hospital. I was asked to report immediately to the Orthopedics office where the wound was “dug out” with a scalpel and NO antiseptic. I got to spend 8 additional days in the hospital getting twice daily an I.V. with an antibiotic so caustic that each time it was administered it would destroy the vein. It felt like battery acid eating away at me for twenty minutes twice a day. It did however save my life and for that I only hate Doctors a little.

[A_Tradition_Continues]

My Dad came home from his CABG surgery with a PICC line and Vancomycin IV’s 3 times daily for 2 months knocking off MRSA.

[DieHard the Hunter]

> I got to spend 8 additional days in the hospital getting twice daily an I.V. with an antibiotic so caustic that each time it was administered it would destroy the vein. It felt like battery acid eating away at me for twenty minutes twice a day. It did however save my life and for that I only hate Doctors a little.

I had a similar experience with an incision that went septic 3 weeks after a knee surgery. Was the antibiotic Flucloxacillin? Felt like gasoline being poured into your vein, even after they diluted it with saline?

I walked around with a hole in my leg the size of a golfball for nearly six months, an open wound that needed to heal from the inside-out. Lucky to have kept my leg.

(Private medicine paid for the original knee operation. Social medicine paid for the subsequent infection treatment that saved my leg — but that’s a whole different debate.)