My DH, Walt, is C5 quadriplegic. He has been for over 50 years. Mostly, he’s not had serious wound issues but when he did, he did it up but good with a stage IV pressure sore on his tailbone (where he sits). He also had a really big nasty wound on his lower leg from having it raked against something metal (he’s not sure what), and after weeks and weeks, it wasn’t healing and had developed a big ol’ black eschar (which he had been telling me was a “scab” but it’s not the same thing). He was at our house in Mexico and would mention this wound to me on the phone, but he plays stuff down so I had no idea how bad it was, and one of the men who works for him (doing personal care) had “mentioned” another sore, which turned out to be a stage IV pressure wound on his coccyx! Hello! Very scary. (For all the years sitting on his rear, he’s done well to avoid them by being moved a LOT, and using a Roho cushion, but he’d been running around Mexico in his Winnebago, forgetting to take care of himself, as men will do when their women aren’t around.)
After seeing 3 different doctors, including Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, and all of them in agreement that he needed a surgery called “flap reconstruction surgery” for the pressure sore, basically a process of chopping him up to the deepest level of the wound, and I suppose stitching it back together, and hoping it would heal, more of a “lick and a promise,” I learned from others online, some of whom had had it repeated 7 times trying to heal, all the time lying flat on one’s back on an airbed which Medicare obviously pays a nice amount on, given the number of calls we got from the wildly enthusiastic bed guy, dying to deliver it and start the billing.
Then one night Walt told me that he decided there was no way he was going to allow them to slice him up and leave him to die - that he'd die on his own terms in his own way. (There’s usually infection in the bone in a stage IV pressure sore and it can quickly go to the bloodstream, as I understand, which is how Christopher Reeve died.) So I did what I always do in a crisis, grabbed and didn’t let go until I found the Derma Wound online at a site called progressivedoctors.com, a site that looked, actually, a bit shady, or not terribly professional, but had a lot of testimonials. I googled the names of the people who had submitted them, and finally came across a gal and her husband, a former Army medic, who were on Facebook, and I contacted them to make sure they had actually used it and had the results they said. And they had. (She is the one who’d had that surgery 7 times for a different wound than the one they used it on.) Well, it made sense that an Army medic would understand wounds better than any wound care center with their fancy equipment, most of which doesn’t work. The husband was super supportive by email as I started in, scared to death, but determined that Walt wasn’t going to die on my watch.
Wound care isn’t something to be done weekly, by the home health care nurses’ schedules - which are, of course, determined by what Medicare will pay for. So to their surprise, and with all due respect that they were doing exactly as they had been taught, I sent the home health nurses packing, and got started, making saline solution at home and applying the DermaWound twice a day. The leg wound was easy enough to treat, and I followed the directions which are given on the website, and saw the wound come to life with fresh blood (to be expected and desirable because a chronic wound won’t heal until is coaxed out of the dormant stage), and although I wanted this wound to heal overnight, it actually took about 6 weeks to completely heal up, and nicely, I might add.
The pressure sore on his butt was small and deep, like the diameter of a pencil, and went to the bone, which was, not sure, but perhaps 2”-3” deep. The healing was slow slow slow, but we got X-rays that showed there was no infection in the bone. He did not sit up longer than 30 minutes at a time, so “Mr. Wildman” who was used to running all over this country and the next, learned to watch a lot of movies and listen to a lot of audiobooks, but he was home, not in a hospital or rehab unit and a darn good patient for me, I must say.
Here’s what I did: I made homemade saline solution (God bless Google) and rinsed it with this in the morning, and then (after much experimenting with equipment) was able to draw about 3 cc’s of the Derma Wound, which is basically just sugar and iodine, out of the tube, into a small disposable syringe, and I squirted it right down into the wound, then covered it with a gauze pad, and then a large adhesive band-aid. There was considerable drainage for a long time, but we could call Dr. Dixon (of Progressivedoctors.com) and ask him anything and get reassurance. The saline solution cost me next to nothing, as I made it by the gallon with distilled water and Kosher salt, brought to boiling, and the Derma Wound is about $40/tube. Over the years, we've used a lot of it.
That was all 3 years ago this month, and the wound is now healed, but because I had to prevent it from closing from the top (they can close at the surface but not be healed beneath), he’s got what I assume will be a permanent scar tissue little orifice (makes me want to check to see why I don’t have one down there, it looks so normal.
). I keep Derma Wound on hand and insist on putting just a tiny dab (all that I can get in) still, as a preventative measure since I can’t actually see what’s going on in there. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions you might have.
Lois
don't ask). He figured if he was put in a nursing home, he would die there. Never having done this before (I was his apartment manager), I learned real quick. He was in the specialized bed for 3 months before being moved back in his hospital bed he used in his apartment. 
) what this valuable information means! Thank you again for sharing....love this forum!
