Okay, sorry. The deal is that I had a hernia repair and a week after the surgery, it was inflamed and infected and full of nasty pus and fluid. I went to the hospital, yelled at a bunch of people, and they drained it. But to ensure that all the fluid gets drained, and that we get any new fluid that's formed, they inserted a drain tube into my body. The tube is attached by a simple stitch at the entry point, and it's connected to a collecting "jug" for lack of a better term. The jug has all the air removed from it when it's attached to the tube and is applying suction to the tube as it tries to return to its normal shape (which is kind of like a grenade, you'll see). As this thing collects fluids, it's important to flush it out every day to ensure that nothing is getting clogged up and blocking the tube.
So once a day I have to flush out my pus bag and here's how I do it.
The first thing is to make sure everything is sterile. I don't have pictures of it, but before starting, I wash my hands thoroughly, dry them and then use some of that alcohol hand sanitizer. It's also important to make sure that you have everything you need set out properly. Here's my tools- a pre-sterilized syringe filled with distilled water; a new cap for the valve on my drain line; some alcohol swabs; and a basin to collect all the pus we'll be draining out:
Here I am modeling this year's latest model of pus bag. As you can see, it's in a transparent plastic so that you can really appreciate the bloody pus that's accumulated inside. By the way, the move I'm showing here is patented (kind of like Blue Steel). I call it, Disco Stu Needs Antibiotics!
Before touching anything, it's important to glove up. This drain goes into my body, so you have to do whatever you can to reduce the chance of introducing new bad stuff to the system.
Now you carefully open everything up and lay it out in front of you. You want to make sure that when you need something, it's easy to just grab and use it.
Here's everything opened and ready to go. Let's flush some pus!
Here's a close up of the valve- this is the crucial device to the whole show. See the blue cap pointing down? That's a sterile cap (or at least it was sterile when I put it on). That's where the syringe is going to go. See the white handle just above the blue cap? That controls the flow of the drain. Essentially, whatever direction it's pointed to is "turned off." Right now it's pointed at the cap, which means that it's flowing from the end of the tube in my body to the drain jug. If you turn it towards the drain jug, then the flow goes from the syringe to inside my body. If you turn it towards my body, the flow goes from the syringe to my drain jug. We'll be using all those possibilities in this process.
Before attaching the syringe, you need to get the air out of the very tip-- you've seen this happen in movies all the time. I tried to hit Jen in the face with it, but missed. She was not amused.
Now you remove the blue cap and you screw the syringe on.
At this point you turn the handle towards my body, which means the flow is going from the syringe to the pus jug. You push a couple of mls of fluid towards the jug, just to clear the tube a bit from the valve.
Then you turn the valve the other way so the flow is from the syringe to the body. Then you inject the rest of the water into your body. If you think this sounds weird, it is. You can feel the water being injected in, and if you look, you can see the swelling.
You may also notice my stretch marks at this point. In my defense, I've had eight kids, so don't give me any crap about it.
Now here's the gross part. All that water I just injected into my body? Well, we've got to pull it out. So now you have to pull back on the syringe and suck out all that fresh, clean water that.... OH MY GOD, WHAT'S THAT! Yeah, it doesn't come out clean. It comes out all bloody and full of pus. And it's a little tricky because the syringe wants to push back in because you can never pull out as much as you put in-- but you can't let that happen! The only thing you ever want going in there is sterile water. So while you're maintaining tension on the syringe with what you've pulled out, you flip the handle on the valve all the way around to switch the flow from the syringe to the pus bag.
Here I am pushing back all the stuff I just sucked out back into the pus bag.
Now here's the pus jug. It's not very full, the first day it was about 3/4 full, this is hardly anything.
All you have to do is pop the top open and this thing reverts to its normal shape.
Now it's as simple as turning it upside down over your basin and squeezing out the juice. A word of warning. Don't squeeze too hard. There's a... splash effect... that can occur. You... uh... really don't want that to happen.
Once it's emptied, you squeeze all the air out of it and cap it back off so it starts applying suction to the drain tube. But it's important to make sure you've swabbed off and sterilized the drain cap before you do so.
And here we go! A drained pus jug! Awesome!
Before adding a new, sterile blue cap, you also have to make sure you've swabbed the area of the valve where the syringe was.
Oh my god! That was so refreshing!
And here's what we flushed out. As you can see, it's not all just blood and pus, there's also some detritus and what look like dead tape worms. Yes, I'm aware of how gross it is. Cut me some slack. It's draining out of my body.
And that's how you change a jug full of pus.
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