Drain Care Instructions with Dr. Alderman

Hey I’m dr. Amy alderman at North Atlanta plastic surgery I want to explain how to take care of your drain output after surgery this patient just had an abdominoplasty I thought it’d be a good time to teach you a little bit about your drain care the drain is going to be secured to your skin with a little suture it comes through this tube and then it hooks up to this bulb a couple of key things are important these drains are in the exact same spot in the abdomen so you might find that one drain fills up more than the other that’s perfectly fine don’t get stressed out if one drains more than the other they’re both kinda in the same spot sometimes one picks up more than the other secondly it’s normal to have some variation in the drainage so you may have little air bubbles in the tubing so you’ll see the clear fluid and it will look kind of reddish and you might seem air bubble that’s perfectly fine that’s normal okay if you know that the bulbs working because it is kind of squeezed in so this is holding suction and it’s allowing the fluid to come into the bulb what you’re gonna do is pop this top off when I pop the top off the little grenade opens up so it’s not an intersection then you have a little specimen Cup and you’re going to squirt the little fluid into the cup and then you squeeze the grenade take this little plastic thing and pop it right in and then it holds suction what I do not want you to do which is very important don’t get creative this is a sterile system so don’t take this off and don’t rinse the bulb don’t take this off and try to dismantle it clean your hands really well pop off the to the top drain it squeeze it put it back on but that’s it don’t do anything else or your container the system and then lastly a good thing to do is to try to strip the drain when you strip the drain that just prevents clots no you will occasionally see it looks like tissue or clots in the tube that’s okay don’t stress out about that but to strip the tubing you’re gonna want to squeeze the tube here at the skin so it doesn’t pull on the skin and then gently take the other hand and squeeze when you see when I’m doing that I’m compressing the tube and it’s giving kind of negative pressure to it so then you can squeeze all along like this and it just kind of helps make sure there are no blood clots and the tube but you have to be careful that you don’t pull it out of the skin or that you’ll really be uncomfortable Katy anything else we need to tell them don’t forget to document the amount of output there’s little graduations on your specimen container and marked down on your drain sheet right or left and the volume at each time in general what we looking for is about 30 CC’s per drain per day and then we can remove the drain so we need you to document the amount again call us if you have any questions and hopefully they don’t find this video helpful look forward to taking care of you