Stay at home nurse?

So this is our routine for the last week. Every 8 hours Eli needs his antibiotics so we go through these steps at 6 am, 2 pm, and 10 pm every day.

1. Mom gathers all the materials. 2 syringes of saline, 1 syringe of heparin, alcohol wipes, and Eli's antibiotic bubble (as he calls it), and my surgical scrub.

2. Wash hands vigorously for 20 seconds. Did you know it's the actual scrubbing motion of your hands that gets them clean more so than what you're cleaning them with? I didn't.

3. Then I use the alcohol wipe to clean the cap of Eli's PICC line. We count to 10 scrubbing the end and then do 10 seconds around the threads where the IV screws on.

4. Once we're clean I inject 5 ml of saline to flush his line and make sure it's open. I then allow Eli to squirt me with the remaining 5ml in the syringe, (and mentally curse the nurse in the hospital who taught him that).

5. Then we hook up his antibiotic bubble. This is very cool, it's a bubble inside of a bubble and it's pressurized so we just pop it into his little fanny pack and he can go back to doing whatever he wants. It takes about 20-30 minutes to finish the dose.

6. When he's done I scrub up again (Thank goodness for the surgical scrub! It doesn't dry out my hands like regular soap would. Though I do smell like a hospital all the time now.)

7. Then I disconnect his medicine and flush his line with 10 ml of saline and then follow that up with 3 ml of heparin to prevent clotting.

Then we're done! He's gotten very used to this...even a little proud of it. Look at his cocky smile in this picture. The other day I heard him bragging to Emma that he got poked, "fifty hundred times," at the hospital. He also loves his little fanny pack. He got to wear it during Sunbeams yesterday and was so thrilled to show everyone his bubble medicine.

We go into the hospital tomorrow for an ultrasound and follow-up with the surgeon to set the date for his surgery. I had to throw this last picture in. This was the night after we came home from the hospital. Eli was eating dinner and it got really quiet so I went to check on him and he was fast asleep in his chair.