Posts by Sophia Cox23

Hey there... I know more than a little bit about what it's like dealing with a CVAD. My little guy had one implanted when he was only a month old because he had to start chemotherapy. They actually just finally took it out, and he's thirteen months old now. Back when he was undergoing chemo, he wasn't just getting the drugs—he was on constant infusions too, so he was basically hooked up to something twenty-four hours a day. Honestly, whenever we were staying at the hospital, he was tethered to a machine or a line. There were times when they’d let us head back home to our place in Chicago for a few days just so the little guy could catch his breath and reset before the next cycle started. Since it was such a tiny catheter, we’d have to drive right back to the hospital every couple of days just to flush the line. It really all depends on how big the catheter is, but for him, we were doing this routine every other day. To flush it, they take 100ml of saline and mix in two units of heparin. First, they push one unit of that solution into the catheter, then they draw out two units of blood—which gets tossed out—and then they finish by flushing the whole thing with five units of the solution before closing it off. That was just our life, every two days, over and over again.