brendaks1

Leave it to me to have this kind of luck!

On August 12 I had L4-L5 decompression/laminectomy/discectomy surgery. About 8 days after surgery, the lower part of my incision started having some bright red/clear drainage. It got worse in the next couple of days and I called my doctor’s office. The nurse said to put a compression dressing on and if it didn’t stop after a couple more days to call back or if it got much worse to contact the on-call doctor. Well, the next morning (last Saturday) I woke up and the compression dressing was completely soaked through with a nasty brownish-yellowing drainage (sorry to gross you out!). I called the on-call doctor, and he said to go to my local urgent care center (I live 3 hours from my spine surgeon). The urgent care doctor took a culture of the drainage, spoke with the on-call spine doctor, and they put me on an antibiotic with instructions to contact my surgeon Monday morning. I wasn’t running a fever and didn’t feel sick at all. The incision drainage continued to soak through bandages over the weekend, and when I called my surgeon’s office on Monday they got me an afternoon appointment, so we were off on a 3 hour drive to see him.

My spine surgeon looked at the draining incision, and recommended another surgery to open the incision and clean everything out. I was admitted to the hospital immediately and they did an MRI that showed a massive (6 inch x 8 inch) fluid pocket deep inside near my first surgery. It turned out that it was a hematoma (blood clot) from me bleeding internally after my first surgery. On top of that, the drainage culture the doctor in the urgent care took a couple of days prior showed an infection with a really nasty bacteria called Klebsiella. They called in an infectious disease specialist doctor to deal with the infection.

Tuesday morning they did another surgery to clean everything out and they did a deep tissue culture to find out if the bacteria had spread very deep, but fortunately the culture never grew anything. I was put on an antibiotic called Cipro for two weeks to deal with the infection, and I stayed in the hospital until this last Friday. This time I have external stitches instead of steristrips. The last couple of days I have been sleeping about 12 hours per day.

What an experience!

They determined that I bled internally after my first surgery which turned into a hematoma. The body will break down internal hematomas after a while and during the process it will turn into a liquid which is when I started draining. Once this opened up my incision to drain out, they said bacteria can also get in, so that’s when the Klebsiella got in but they don’t think it had yet gotten in very far.

For all of you that are awaiting surgery, please don’t be scared by this – this is a very rare complication and highly unlikely that it would happen to you.