Signs of a Failing Permcath

[George Jung]

What are the signs of a failing permcath?  How long does it take?  What else should someone know about it?

[thegrammalady]

infection. low clearence rate.

i just had one replaced, ithe cuff was working its way out. i'd call that failure. it took 10 months.

[keefer51]

George with the ones i have had and i have six of them. I knew something was wrong when the machine would constantly beep. They would have to come over and run the machine slower. It wouldn't take long before i would get the "Fever". I would sit there and tremble my whole body would ache and i would be very cold. They would have to replace it right away.

[TwistedKitten]

It really depends on the person how fast a permcath fails. It has to do with how well your body heals it self. A fibrin sheath forms around the end of the catheter. The way Belinda (my vascular access nurse at my hosp.) described it to me is that as you know a permcath is a foreign object in your body and the way the body deals with it is trying to push it out and if it can't it forms a sheath around the object, kind of like a "hard sock", her words not mine". I form sheaths relatively fast, where as a woman in my unit had her permcath work for a year and a half before it needed to be changed. Signs like others have said are lots of alarms, low flow rates, and low clearance rates.

[Jamesw]

It really depends on the person how fast a permcath fails. It has to do with how well your body heals it self. A fibrin sheath forms around the end of the catheter. The way Belinda (my vascular access nurse at my hosp.) described it to me is that as you know a permcath is a foreign object in your body and the way the body deals with it is trying to push it out and if it can't it forms a sheath around the object, kind of like a "hard sock", her words not mine". I form sheaths relatively fast, where as a woman in my unit had her permcath work for a year and a half before it needed to be changed. Signs like others have said are lots of alarms, low flow rates, and low clearance rates.

For sure before I had my fistula I went through three permcaths in about six months. The first one developed a fibrin sheath like you described, the second permcath just never worked well from when it was first installed. Without even doing the checks for clearance (in my experience) a bad catheter can cause all sorts of problem, high venous and arterial pressures, air in blood alarms and TMP alarms.