Steve's hospital thread
-
territorygal
- Posts: 1958
- Joined: Fri 26 Sep 2008, 5:53 am
Re: Back in hospital again
Glad to hear you're back home, Steve.
And everything about tonight feels right and so young
And anything I'd want to say out loud will be sung
It's in the music...
And anything I'd want to say out loud will be sung
It's in the music...
-
Fugitive1979
- Posts: 6135
- Joined: Tue 31 Oct 2006, 11:05 pm
- Contact:
-
billiejo
- Posts: 1124
- Joined: Wed 09 Aug 2006, 9:02 am
-
Naughty Zoot
- Posts: 1610
- Joined: Fri 31 Oct 2003, 3:45 am
Re: Back in hospital again
Thank Heaven that you're on an uphill trajcetory! All the best, Steve. Keep us up to speed.
We need you, buddy. All of you ...
We need you, buddy. All of you ...
I like it here ~~ wherever it is ...
Re: Back in hospital again
Thanks for the messages, they've all been very much appreciated this very, very dark and depressing last 8 months. I am not 'home and dry' ( 
) by any means, but hopefully, with a little bit of luck for a change things are now heading in the right direction. I won't know until I finish these antibiotics.
StevePSB
) by any means, but hopefully, with a little bit of luck for a change things are now heading in the right direction. I won't know until I finish these antibiotics.StevePSB
-
RaciePSB
- Posts: 1052
- Joined: Sat 15 Nov 2003, 8:32 am
- Contact:
Re: Back in hospital again
Darling, I know you are SOOOO sick of hearing this, but your own perceptions of what is going on in your body; how much you believe that the antibiotics will work for you; and your ability to banish negative thoughts as they creep into your consciousness, has a HUGE effect on the healing process, and outcome.
I used to get migraine so severe - the sensation of pressure felt like my brain had expanded and was trying to find it's way out of my head, which would surely burst open any second. God, that PAIN! I can never forget it. Give me childbirth over a migraine any day! But somebody told me about visualisation techniques and after a fair amount of practice I was able to reduce the severity (or at least my perception of the severity) of an attack. I would imagine that the pain as a red ball of heat and I would focus on this red coloured pain dissipating slowly and moving out of my head, until it was gone. I could almost convince myself the pain had gone, and even if it hadn't, it somehow wasn't as troubling and debilitating as it had been. A bit like depersonalisation.. kind of observing it rather than feeling it. I'm pretty sure hypnotism works on the same basis.
In your case sweetie, you'd have to visualise your knee with the infection as a swollen red (yellow/green, whatever works for you) mass of bad bugs, and the antibiotics combined with your body's own white blood cells working together like a little army to devour the bad guys. Repeatedly seeing this process in your mind and reinforcing the image with affirming thoughts, such as "these antibiotics are the best there are, and they will work well for me." "I am feeling so much better every day!" "My knee is healed, and when I am finished this course of medication, I'm going to ....(whatever you've been prevented from doing and are looking forward to once you're better).
This doesn't work for everybody, of course. If you're naturally skeptical (which you are, hun) you have to try to open your mind. What have you got to lose?
http://www.o-wm.com/article/1010 (mind body techniques in wound healing from a medical journal)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 202AA5rU3a
I used to get migraine so severe - the sensation of pressure felt like my brain had expanded and was trying to find it's way out of my head, which would surely burst open any second. God, that PAIN! I can never forget it. Give me childbirth over a migraine any day! But somebody told me about visualisation techniques and after a fair amount of practice I was able to reduce the severity (or at least my perception of the severity) of an attack. I would imagine that the pain as a red ball of heat and I would focus on this red coloured pain dissipating slowly and moving out of my head, until it was gone. I could almost convince myself the pain had gone, and even if it hadn't, it somehow wasn't as troubling and debilitating as it had been. A bit like depersonalisation.. kind of observing it rather than feeling it. I'm pretty sure hypnotism works on the same basis.
In your case sweetie, you'd have to visualise your knee with the infection as a swollen red (yellow/green, whatever works for you) mass of bad bugs, and the antibiotics combined with your body's own white blood cells working together like a little army to devour the bad guys. Repeatedly seeing this process in your mind and reinforcing the image with affirming thoughts, such as "these antibiotics are the best there are, and they will work well for me." "I am feeling so much better every day!" "My knee is healed, and when I am finished this course of medication, I'm going to ....(whatever you've been prevented from doing and are looking forward to once you're better).
This doesn't work for everybody, of course. If you're naturally skeptical (which you are, hun) you have to try to open your mind. What have you got to lose?
http://www.o-wm.com/article/1010 (mind body techniques in wound healing from a medical journal)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 202AA5rU3a
Rachel
Happily PSB-obsessed since 1986
Happily PSB-obsessed since 1986
-
RaciePSB
- Posts: 1052
- Joined: Sat 15 Nov 2003, 8:32 am
- Contact:
Re: Back in hospital again
Here's an article you might find interesting..
If Mind Is a True Believer, Placebo Effect Can Work Wonders
By BOYCE RENSBERGER, WASHINGTON POST
April 15
Deep within the human mind lies a little-known power of extraordinary force. The wise men of ancient civilizations used the power to achieve remarkable feats. And now you, too, can tap into this amazing ability.
If that sounds like a pitch for New Age mumbo-jumbo about holistic crystals or some such, don't be put off. It is a pitch for something at least as amazing, and, all the better, a pitch for something quite probably real.
It's called the placebo effect, and you can also think of it as faith healing or as "the power of suggestion" or even as witch-doctoring. Although often pseudoscientific or sometimes fraudulent, all of these succeed in certain ways because of a phenomenon that biomedical scientists now know to be powerful and useful. Maybe it should be called the placebo force.
The word placebo is Latin for "I shall please." It was adopted long before the era of scientific medicine by physicians who knew they had little to offer patients except hope and the sense that something was being done for them, even if it was only the laying on of hands or the administration of an impressively prepared potion. But scientists now know that there really is a placebo force--a power, or probably several powers, in the brain that can heal the body of many different (though definitely not all) ailments--from warts and battle wounds to infections and headaches. The power must, however, be invoked in the right way.
It doesn't matter what form the placebo takes. It can be a country doctor's sugar pill or a Navajo medicine man's five days of chanting and sand-painting inside the sacred hogan. It can be a thwak upside the head from a tent revivalist faith healer (even one of the variety shown to be outright frauds) or it can be a mother's kiss. The one paramount factor that matters, scientific experiments show, is that the patient truly believes the method can work. "Faith healing" turns out to be an apt name, though the religious kind of faith is not necessary. Faith in the method is.
If that faith is present, messages go out from the believing brain to communicate with many different physiological mechanisms throughout the body. Researchers believe the messages start out as ordinary nerve impulses transmitted from the brain through the nervous system to the afflicted part of the body. There the nerves release certain chemicals that act on the cells to correct the problem.
The placebo effect is not a cure-all. But most diseases are self-limiting, and the normal disease-fighting and recuperative powers of the body eventually triumph. The placebo effect merely seems to speed up these normal processes--healing wounds faster and boosting the immune system's attack on infection.
Perhaps the most studied placebo mechanism is the one that helps control pain. One of the most dramatic examples arose in the 1950s, when a curious form of surgery was being touted as a cure for the severe chest pains of angina. Heart surgeons would open a patient's chest and tie off the internal mammary artery. This was supposed to divert more blood to the heart's coronary arteries and relieve the pain.
Early reports on the procedure, called an internal mammary artery ligation, were stunning. More than 90% of patients reported dramatic relief of pain, and 75% performed better on stress tests. But many doctors were suspicious. They devised an experiment the likes of which would not be allowed under today's rules on human experimentation.
Angina patients were randomly assigned to either of two groups. One group received the standard artery ligation. The other got a placebo operation, but the patients were not told. They got the usual elaborate preparations for surgery and were anesthetized. Surgeons cut open each chest, looked at the artery and sewed up the incision. When the patients came to, they had the expected postoperative pain, a sure sign that something powerful had been done to them, and stitches in the right place.
Those who got the sham surgery reported just as much pain relief as those who got the real thing. Even though some 10,000 of the operations had been done, the experiment proved they were doing no good--at least not directly. It proved that what was doing good was the placebo effect. The patients believed that all the most advanced techniques of modern medicine were being applied to them, and the placebo force did the rest.
Internal mammary artery ligations were stopped immediately, but the question remains: How did the placebo force cure the angina?
The answer has become clear in just the last few years. When the brain wants to kill pain, it sends signals to the painful area that cause the local nerve cells to release a natural pain-killing substance called endorphin. This is the morphinelike molecule that also produces the "runner's high."
Jon Levine, a pharmacologist at the UC San Francisco, has even found that a placebo pill has the pain-killing power of 8 milligrams of morphine or 80 milligrams of Demerol. He determined this by giving volunteers the drug naloxone, which is known to block the action of morphine, before treating their pain with placebos--with no effect.
The fact that naloxone blocks the placebo effect is good evidence that the effect is the result of the morphinelike substance endorphin. Levine found that the amount of naloxone needed to do this was the amount needed to block 8 milligrams of morphine. A typical morphine pill is 10 milligrams. Pain is not the only thing placebos can treat.
In 1955, Henry Beecher of the Harvard Medical School reviewed published studies of the placebo effect and found the phenomenon was good for treating postsurgical wound pain, seasickness, headaches, coughs, anxiety and other nervous disorders. Since then, the medical literature has exploded with still wider evidence of the placebo effect's range. Placebos have produced improvement in high blood pressure, depression, acne, asthma, colds, arthritis, ulcers, constipation and even cholesterol counts.
Because placebos can produce so many desirable effects, no test of a new drug or other treatment is considered valid unless it compares the new agent with a placebo. The placebo is designed to look so much like the experimental treatment that neither the patient nor the doctor can tell which is which. This is called double-blind testing. The doctor knows only a code number for the treatment he dispenses. Only after the effects are recorded is the code broken to reveal who got the placebo and who got the real thing. Only if the experimental treatment's effects are better than the placebo's do scientists believe it is doing anything more than stimulating the placebo effect.
Endorphins cannot account for all placebo effects. There are scores of other special chemicals that nerve cells can put out, and researchers suspect they accomplish many placebo effects. Called neurotransmitters, they include serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and acetylcholine. These molecules can carry messages from one nerve cell to another (this is their classically understood role), and they can carry messages from the nervous system to almost any other cell of the body. Some even act on the cells of the immune system, boosting their capacity to fight infection.
Warts offer a dramatic example.
Warts are a benign tumor caused by a virus infection. They can sprout in clusters and persist for years, or they can go away for no obvious reason. They can also, as many doctors have known for centuries, go away through the placebo effect. For many years the famous Merck Manual, a thoroughly scientific compendium, advised doctors to "hex" warts with an impressive ritual such as painting the warts red and invoking mystical powers. It works best with children, the manual said.
In a controlled experiment reported in the British medical journal Lancet in 1959, volunteers with warts all over their bodies were hypnotized and told that the warts would disappear on one side but not the other. Within weeks, exactly that happened to most of the volunteers. Hypnosis is a legitimately amazing phenomenon in its own right, but its role in this case is thought to be that of a ritual that invokes the placebo power. "Abracadabra" would work as well, as long as the patient had good reason to believe it was truly a powerful word.
Doctors have been using the placebo force for thousands of years, whether they knew it or not. A good share of the benefit conferred by every therapeutic act, placebo research now reveals, comes from the placebo effect. Even if the drug or procedure has intrinsic benefits as well, the placebo effect will enhance the benefit--so long as patients have faith in their doctors.
Which raises the question of whether the modern trend toward demythologizing doctors and publicizing their fallibilities may be depriving their patients of genuinely beneficial placebo effects. If so, in a health care system based solely on reason, would one of the most powerful and versatile promoters of good health be lost?
Related Articles
'I shall please' -- it's an old promise Dec 12, 2005
Study: 'Placebo Effect' May Not Be Real Either May 24, 2001
Why Placebo Helps Parkinson's Patients Aug 13, 2001
If Mind Is a True Believer, Placebo Effect Can Work Wonders
By BOYCE RENSBERGER, WASHINGTON POST
April 15
Deep within the human mind lies a little-known power of extraordinary force. The wise men of ancient civilizations used the power to achieve remarkable feats. And now you, too, can tap into this amazing ability.
If that sounds like a pitch for New Age mumbo-jumbo about holistic crystals or some such, don't be put off. It is a pitch for something at least as amazing, and, all the better, a pitch for something quite probably real.
It's called the placebo effect, and you can also think of it as faith healing or as "the power of suggestion" or even as witch-doctoring. Although often pseudoscientific or sometimes fraudulent, all of these succeed in certain ways because of a phenomenon that biomedical scientists now know to be powerful and useful. Maybe it should be called the placebo force.
The word placebo is Latin for "I shall please." It was adopted long before the era of scientific medicine by physicians who knew they had little to offer patients except hope and the sense that something was being done for them, even if it was only the laying on of hands or the administration of an impressively prepared potion. But scientists now know that there really is a placebo force--a power, or probably several powers, in the brain that can heal the body of many different (though definitely not all) ailments--from warts and battle wounds to infections and headaches. The power must, however, be invoked in the right way.
It doesn't matter what form the placebo takes. It can be a country doctor's sugar pill or a Navajo medicine man's five days of chanting and sand-painting inside the sacred hogan. It can be a thwak upside the head from a tent revivalist faith healer (even one of the variety shown to be outright frauds) or it can be a mother's kiss. The one paramount factor that matters, scientific experiments show, is that the patient truly believes the method can work. "Faith healing" turns out to be an apt name, though the religious kind of faith is not necessary. Faith in the method is.
If that faith is present, messages go out from the believing brain to communicate with many different physiological mechanisms throughout the body. Researchers believe the messages start out as ordinary nerve impulses transmitted from the brain through the nervous system to the afflicted part of the body. There the nerves release certain chemicals that act on the cells to correct the problem.
The placebo effect is not a cure-all. But most diseases are self-limiting, and the normal disease-fighting and recuperative powers of the body eventually triumph. The placebo effect merely seems to speed up these normal processes--healing wounds faster and boosting the immune system's attack on infection.
Perhaps the most studied placebo mechanism is the one that helps control pain. One of the most dramatic examples arose in the 1950s, when a curious form of surgery was being touted as a cure for the severe chest pains of angina. Heart surgeons would open a patient's chest and tie off the internal mammary artery. This was supposed to divert more blood to the heart's coronary arteries and relieve the pain.
Early reports on the procedure, called an internal mammary artery ligation, were stunning. More than 90% of patients reported dramatic relief of pain, and 75% performed better on stress tests. But many doctors were suspicious. They devised an experiment the likes of which would not be allowed under today's rules on human experimentation.
Angina patients were randomly assigned to either of two groups. One group received the standard artery ligation. The other got a placebo operation, but the patients were not told. They got the usual elaborate preparations for surgery and were anesthetized. Surgeons cut open each chest, looked at the artery and sewed up the incision. When the patients came to, they had the expected postoperative pain, a sure sign that something powerful had been done to them, and stitches in the right place.
Those who got the sham surgery reported just as much pain relief as those who got the real thing. Even though some 10,000 of the operations had been done, the experiment proved they were doing no good--at least not directly. It proved that what was doing good was the placebo effect. The patients believed that all the most advanced techniques of modern medicine were being applied to them, and the placebo force did the rest.
Internal mammary artery ligations were stopped immediately, but the question remains: How did the placebo force cure the angina?
The answer has become clear in just the last few years. When the brain wants to kill pain, it sends signals to the painful area that cause the local nerve cells to release a natural pain-killing substance called endorphin. This is the morphinelike molecule that also produces the "runner's high."
Jon Levine, a pharmacologist at the UC San Francisco, has even found that a placebo pill has the pain-killing power of 8 milligrams of morphine or 80 milligrams of Demerol. He determined this by giving volunteers the drug naloxone, which is known to block the action of morphine, before treating their pain with placebos--with no effect.
The fact that naloxone blocks the placebo effect is good evidence that the effect is the result of the morphinelike substance endorphin. Levine found that the amount of naloxone needed to do this was the amount needed to block 8 milligrams of morphine. A typical morphine pill is 10 milligrams. Pain is not the only thing placebos can treat.
In 1955, Henry Beecher of the Harvard Medical School reviewed published studies of the placebo effect and found the phenomenon was good for treating postsurgical wound pain, seasickness, headaches, coughs, anxiety and other nervous disorders. Since then, the medical literature has exploded with still wider evidence of the placebo effect's range. Placebos have produced improvement in high blood pressure, depression, acne, asthma, colds, arthritis, ulcers, constipation and even cholesterol counts.
Because placebos can produce so many desirable effects, no test of a new drug or other treatment is considered valid unless it compares the new agent with a placebo. The placebo is designed to look so much like the experimental treatment that neither the patient nor the doctor can tell which is which. This is called double-blind testing. The doctor knows only a code number for the treatment he dispenses. Only after the effects are recorded is the code broken to reveal who got the placebo and who got the real thing. Only if the experimental treatment's effects are better than the placebo's do scientists believe it is doing anything more than stimulating the placebo effect.
Endorphins cannot account for all placebo effects. There are scores of other special chemicals that nerve cells can put out, and researchers suspect they accomplish many placebo effects. Called neurotransmitters, they include serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and acetylcholine. These molecules can carry messages from one nerve cell to another (this is their classically understood role), and they can carry messages from the nervous system to almost any other cell of the body. Some even act on the cells of the immune system, boosting their capacity to fight infection.
Warts offer a dramatic example.
Warts are a benign tumor caused by a virus infection. They can sprout in clusters and persist for years, or they can go away for no obvious reason. They can also, as many doctors have known for centuries, go away through the placebo effect. For many years the famous Merck Manual, a thoroughly scientific compendium, advised doctors to "hex" warts with an impressive ritual such as painting the warts red and invoking mystical powers. It works best with children, the manual said.
In a controlled experiment reported in the British medical journal Lancet in 1959, volunteers with warts all over their bodies were hypnotized and told that the warts would disappear on one side but not the other. Within weeks, exactly that happened to most of the volunteers. Hypnosis is a legitimately amazing phenomenon in its own right, but its role in this case is thought to be that of a ritual that invokes the placebo power. "Abracadabra" would work as well, as long as the patient had good reason to believe it was truly a powerful word.
Doctors have been using the placebo force for thousands of years, whether they knew it or not. A good share of the benefit conferred by every therapeutic act, placebo research now reveals, comes from the placebo effect. Even if the drug or procedure has intrinsic benefits as well, the placebo effect will enhance the benefit--so long as patients have faith in their doctors.
Which raises the question of whether the modern trend toward demythologizing doctors and publicizing their fallibilities may be depriving their patients of genuinely beneficial placebo effects. If so, in a health care system based solely on reason, would one of the most powerful and versatile promoters of good health be lost?
Related Articles
'I shall please' -- it's an old promise Dec 12, 2005
Study: 'Placebo Effect' May Not Be Real Either May 24, 2001
Why Placebo Helps Parkinson's Patients Aug 13, 2001
Rachel
Happily PSB-obsessed since 1986
Happily PSB-obsessed since 1986
-
Your Funny Uncle
- Posts: 2143
- Joined: Wed 08 Jan 2003, 1:55 am
Re: Back in hospital again
Oh dear Steve. I hadn't checked the forums for a few weeks and now I find this thread! I really hope that this time the antibiotics kick out the infection for good!
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
Re: Steve's hospital thread
Saw them in outpatients again this afternoon. My antibiotics finish tomorrow and the results from last week's blood test show the 'inflammatory markers' (ie: signs of infection) are down further than they have been, but crucially they are still showing there's infection there after 7 solid weeks of very strong antibiotics. That's bad news at this point as it means in all likelihood that as soon as the antibiotics are out of my system the infection will get hold again.
I am supposed to be back in hospital in three weeks for them to take a blood sample from my knee area again to see what is going on in there, but given what I've just said above it wouldn't surprise me if I have to go back in a lot sooner than that.
If the infection does stay or get worse then they're talking about how long term antibiotics might be worth a go as apparently they can sometimes rid a stubborn infection slowly but surely. Initially my thoughts were that it might be a good idea, but given how bad the side effects of all the different drugs I've been on lately are I don't think I could go with that. Then we're into the 'discussing the options' which I suspect basically translates into them telling me there's no fix other than losing my leg.
It's all very tiresome. I am fed up of feeling like crap on various antibiotics over the last 9 months, fed up of worrying about what work are thinking about the whole thing (I don't want to feel like I am pressured into amputation sooner than I possibly should for fear I might not have a job if I let it go on for longer), fed up of having no money, fed up of being treated like shit by the benefit system that sees everyone as a benefit cheat first and genuinely ill second, fed up of living life in limbo & not being able to plan anything because I don't know what the immediate future holds, and basically just fed up with life in general at the moment.
We could still find I am OK once these antibiotics stop, but I have been so beaten down with things going wrong since December I can no longer see a positive side.
Not much else to say really...
StevePSB
I am supposed to be back in hospital in three weeks for them to take a blood sample from my knee area again to see what is going on in there, but given what I've just said above it wouldn't surprise me if I have to go back in a lot sooner than that.
If the infection does stay or get worse then they're talking about how long term antibiotics might be worth a go as apparently they can sometimes rid a stubborn infection slowly but surely. Initially my thoughts were that it might be a good idea, but given how bad the side effects of all the different drugs I've been on lately are I don't think I could go with that. Then we're into the 'discussing the options' which I suspect basically translates into them telling me there's no fix other than losing my leg.
It's all very tiresome. I am fed up of feeling like crap on various antibiotics over the last 9 months, fed up of worrying about what work are thinking about the whole thing (I don't want to feel like I am pressured into amputation sooner than I possibly should for fear I might not have a job if I let it go on for longer), fed up of having no money, fed up of being treated like shit by the benefit system that sees everyone as a benefit cheat first and genuinely ill second, fed up of living life in limbo & not being able to plan anything because I don't know what the immediate future holds, and basically just fed up with life in general at the moment.
We could still find I am OK once these antibiotics stop, but I have been so beaten down with things going wrong since December I can no longer see a positive side.
Not much else to say really...
StevePSB
-
df118junkie
- Posts: 891
- Joined: Thu 30 Oct 2003, 5:04 am
Re: Steve's hospital thread
I couldn't say without asking them. In an ordinary flesh infection it probably would have gone completely by now. The problem is the prosthesis - once the infection is on and around the metal it is near impossible to get rid of with the metal still in there.
StevePSB
StevePSB
-
glennjridge
- Posts: 8205
- Joined: Sat 01 Nov 2003, 9:28 pm
Re: Steve's hospital thread
I wasnt aware that those things were metal.sheeesh.
in my mind somehow I pictured some form of tough durable plastic that was more close to bone.
I'm sure going thru what you've gone thru you are pratically as knowlegeable as doctors are on prosthesis.
you cant be the only one going thru this type of issue,one wonders though if there is some new technique somewhere,some new material.maybe as a plan B for people who have problems with persistent infections. anyways as you can imagine wer're all pulling for ya.
in my mind somehow I pictured some form of tough durable plastic that was more close to bone.
I'm sure going thru what you've gone thru you are pratically as knowlegeable as doctors are on prosthesis.
you cant be the only one going thru this type of issue,one wonders though if there is some new technique somewhere,some new material.maybe as a plan B for people who have problems with persistent infections. anyways as you can imagine wer're all pulling for ya.
Re: Steve's hospital thread
Below is a link to a study written (mainly) by my consultant, Mr. Jeys. A two stage revision is what I had earlier in the year - ie: take out old prosthesis and put in an antibiotic 'spacer' to take up the gap until such time as the infection is cleared (and it was, the infection I have now is a new one) and a new prosthesis can go in. I did ask a while back if another revision might be best, but it seemed as though they didn't want to give that idea much time. I think I'll have to try to bring it back up even if it does mean months more treatment - I'd rather that if it stood a good chance of working than losing my leg. There must be a reason they were reluctant to discuss another revision though. I suspect it's probably because a revision can cause a lot of damage (especially to bone as these prosthesis are cemented very firmly in) and there comes a point where they can't go on - maybe that's the reason. I don't know, but we're going to have to talk if & when I am back in hospital.
http://proceedings.jbjs.org.uk/cgi/cont ... _III/297-c
StevePSB
http://proceedings.jbjs.org.uk/cgi/cont ... _III/297-c
StevePSB
-
BecciJ
- Posts: 764
- Joined: Sat 02 Jun 2007, 9:21 pm
-
df118junkie
- Posts: 891
- Joined: Thu 30 Oct 2003, 5:04 am
Re: Steve's hospital thread
I am asking this because I have been a surgical nurse for 21 years. I am currently a Director of Perioperative Services at a well known LA hospital. I work with orthopaedic surgeons every day, and know how to do these surgeries. I can maybe provide insight, or get answers to things that you may not know to ask.StevePSB wrote:I couldn't say without asking them. In an ordinary flesh infection it probably would have gone completely by now. The problem is the prosthesis - once the infection is on and around the metal it is near impossible to get rid of with the metal still in there.
StevePSB
You are right that there are only so many revisions you can do, otherwise the compound bone loss means that amputation is inevitable. You are young, and so they are trying to avoid the scenario. What antibiotics are you on ?
I am happy to get you some answers if you wish.