Hi everybody! This is Christina, the Amputee OT.
In this video, I am going to show you how this system On-Q works.
*Mechanical whirring noises*
I've got catheter attached there; and then let's see if you can see this-- yea, there
is where the catheter goes in. And it goes into my
nerve that runs up here --I think it's a saphenous nerve. So what will happen with this system
is that it will slowly drain out into my leg. You can see more this one is still pretty full;
but if you look at this one, you see it's kind of getting wrinkly--and that's because
the lupicaine the anesthetic is draining out in there. So the anesthetic lasts like
three days. So this will just get smaller and smaller and more wrinkly until it's all empty.
So what this system does, and this one, is that you can see there's a little thing here to adjust
how much goes into me; and then there's a catheter here, and it goes down-- you can't really see, but
it's inserted into my residual limb. What this does is, it pumps bupivacaine into my residual
limb next to the nerves constantly for pain relief. And then i will remove it from me;
and let me tell you about this thing. The first time when I got my residual amputated above the
knee, it was the worst pain I had ever been in my entire life-- it was awful. This time,
it's barely anything. So I am absolutely in love with this. I mean, there's some pain-- like ,when
I move my residual limb, it's painful--but it's nothing like i experienced before . If I'm just
sitting here, I'm in no pain--it's only when I move around-- when I move around, the pain is
--it's uncomfortable but it's pretty tolerable--and so that's because I've got this.
I love it is amazing. I love it so much. I'm not taking any narcotics. Um,
they've given me some ibuprofen; no narcotics; and I have barely passed the 24 hour mark of when my
revision occurred. I had a TMR and --which is targeted muscle reinnervation; and I had a myo
dec no-- yeah, so I had TMR which is targeted muscle re-innervation; and a myodesis,
where they anchor the muscles to the bone. And they also cut a little bit of bone off; so
this is awesome. I love this. I am going to sing the praises of the On-Q for, like, the rest of
my life.It's-- it's great. It's amazing. You know it's kind of an issue because you have to
carry it around with you, and it dangles; but I've got a little bag-- it's in this little cute bag;
and when I go anywhere, I just put it around my neck. So, yeah I love it. Hey guys, it's
Christina. So you can see from my environment now, I am home. I got discharged from the hospital--
um, three o'clock; maybe got home at four o'clock or something like that.
And since then, my pain has been increasing in my residual limb, and I think i know why-- so I got
two of these. This is the bigger one; this is the smaller one. You can see this one is emptying out;
but this one honestly looks about the same as when I got it; so it seems like it's not draining
the lidocaine into my residual limb; and I look in the cord, the catheter is there.
There's a bunch of fluid in-- underneath the tegaderm
Like quite a lot sort of
So I think it's not going into my body for some reason-- and, uh internet says
that the the On-Q website-- the On-Q website says that I should call them--
uh they have a 24-hour line; but I don't know what they're going to be able to do about
my catheter not working in the middle of the night at 2 am. So I'm just gonna have
to suffer through the pain into the morning. Although it's not horrifying, it's just sort of
mild, I would say mildly distressing-- maybe like a five or six or something; um, but obviously
something's going on there where the the liquid is not going into my body. It's just kind of
--I don't know, maybe I'm sure there's like a pressure limitation on these things or something
,uh, to prevent them from blowing a bunch of lidocaine into your body.
And blowing out --I don't know. Even a little bit wet here.
And I think that's because i tried to turn it up. There's a knob on here knob.
It was on 10 and i turned it up to 14.
I think turning it up to 14 is what caused it to leak into here; so that sucks.
All right; so it's been a couple of days, and one of my On-Qs is totally empty; so I'm gonna
go ahead and take both of them out. I've been carrying them around in that little bag there.
As you can see, the catheter is sort of coiled around; and then taped under some
Tegaderm--that's that; if you pull on it a little bit accidentally, it doesn't pull it out of you.
And here is the catheter that I pulled out of my leg by the way with my doctor's permission
they gave me instructions on how to remove this catheter myself. Doing this doesn't hurt at all;
but I'm pulling it out really slowly, because i guess i'm afraid that it might
hurt
so
And here I am pulling out the other catheter; which, interestingly, was only in a couple of
inches --compared to, like, a foot for the other one . All right, that's all for now! I hope you
enjoyed this video! Thanks for following my journey ; and ...See you later! Bye!