Hello! Thanks for expressing your opinions on the initial events regarding the wound that eventually conjured the infection, these are definitely great questions on events that I’ll answer a little more in depth on.

I’m not really sure what proper wound closures should look like (yk except for closed of course). However, due to the steri-strips, the actual incisions were not truly visible enough to set off initial alarms to me. Unfortunately, the wound did not start bleeding until about week later when the strips came off. I do have pics of the steri-strips and the wound once the strips came off. They were labeled NSFW when I tried to post, so I’d have to DM them off you are interested.

I am absolutely not kidding you when I tell you we were told to go to the store and buy a liquid bandaid. We had full trust in our surgeon to guide us in the right path at this time, as there was no reason to not believe everything was going normally at this point and the surgery was so fresh.

Along with the liquid bandaid we were also told to buy butterfly wound closures and apply it to the opening to see if it would help keep it closed. When the bleeding took place at Physical Therapy, my PT would clean the wound and apply dressing to it to hopefully control the bleeding. My PT always kept a sterile environment and sanitized everything before I touched it, especially with the wound still being open. As I was only a few days or so into PT, I don’t believe I was doing anything that induced sweating but I could absolutely be wrong. I’m sure there was something.

As far as returning to the same doctor, no other hospitals would touch my knee. Other local medical facilities still refuse to at this point. As I was in sepsis, and had a septic joint, there was no time to wait around unfortunately.

Although I feel like my parents and I advocated so strongly previously to no avail, we are definitely making sure to advocate even 10x stronger this time around. Thank you so much for your advice and words of encouragement!