speaking of grace and medical trauma, after watching 2 hours of central line placement videos for fanart reasons, i think it would be a really juicy hell scenario for him to deal with. grim posted before about how he'd likely have one of those for the coma, and since those are REALLY dangerous to rip out on your own we can assume armando removed it before he fully regained consciousness... but.... what if it was placed back after the adrian adventure near death experience.... or some other medical complication on the road to erid... or even ON erid, after they transfer the hail mary's robot nurse system on the ground to monitor grace's deteriorating health better. he should be so not normal about it. he should be SO not normal about it. something IN his body that gives anyone 24/7 access to him for liquids and antibiotics and anaesthetic delivered straight to his heart and it's just. there. available. can't rip it out without risking an embolism or bleeding to death. the corners are literally stitched into his skin. it should make his skin crawl
(reply via @acosmic)
yeah🥰 especially if he keeps worrying at it and messing with it like someone scratching around an itch for any small relief (the itch being Oh God Get This Thing Out Of My Neck Right Now), or maybe thinking about it causes him so much distress he does everything he can to pretend it doesn't exist so he neglects to clean it appropriately, maybe he starts working on various experiments so he has a valid excuse totally needs to sleep in the lab so armando has no access to him while unconscious for monitoring purposes, which means the nanny-arms can't clean the area For him until it's bad enough that it requires medical intervention. and then he's even less normal about it
Central lines can be easily removed: you remove the dressing, put on clean gloves, cut the stiches with a scalpell or small scissors, pull the line out, press on the wound for 3-5 min, then put a dressing on. It is in a vein, not an artery, so pressing on it for a bit will stop the bleed.
I've done removal of central lines in many patients and I'd be happy to do it on myself. It's neither difficult nor dangerous. (But you can make it so for dramatic fanfiction reasons!)
As for keeping it clean while it's in: there are special line dressings with an antibiotic patch on it that protect the insertion site. On the end of the line is usually a special connector that needs to be cleaned with a antiseptic wipe before injecting anything.
Yes, I'm sure central line removals are perfectly safe in the hands of a calm and collected medical professional, the whole "unconsenting, recently comatose, panicking amnesiac who ripped a still-inflated catheter out of his urethra and then hid under a bed to avoid medical attention" part is pretty crucial to the discussion, lol.
in scenarios where he has one placed later in the timeline, it's not so much about the IV line itself being physically difficult to remove, it's about it being necessary and having to deal with the constant stress of how having one would trigger his medical trauma.
the cleaning procedure could be the easiest thing in the world, but every once in a while, the dressings would still need to be changed, and the entry point would need to be left alone and kept clean to avoid infection and skin irritation, but people who suffer from PTSD after their body autonomy was violated (be it SA or, in grace's case: violent nonconsensual sedation) very commonly struggle with basic hygiene as a form of chronic avoidance. and if there's one things that don't go well together it's "bad hygiene" and "long term open wounds"😅
