Cancer – Chemo Midlines and PICC

Transcript

If you’re not having a port placed. Then a couple of other options are what are called midlines and PICC lines. Now we do worry about infection a little bit more because they come up out of the skin. So chemotherapy is going to drop your white counts and then you have an access site that could get infected. So PICC lines and midlines are alternatives to ports where they aren’t quite as permanent, or at least they don’t last as long as the port potentially can, cause it can be years if it’s flushed regularly enough, but a midline and a PICC line will at least get you through your treatments if there’s a certain finite duration for them or just a couple of cycles, but they do carry the risk of infection, and you have to use a little more care when you’re showering and getting dressed than you would with a port that’s under your skin and has the catheter in the blood vessel that dumps right above your heart.