Table of Contents
- Essential Guide to Pin Care: How to Stop a Pin Tract Infection Before It Starts
- Understanding Your New Daily Ritual
- The Cleaning Technique
- To Pick or Not to Pick the "Crusties"
- Recognizing the Warning Signs
- Keeping Life Clean
If you are going through height lengthening surgery using an external fixator, you have probably spent a lot of time looking at that metal frame around your leg. It looks intense. It looks industrial. And if we are being honest, it can look a little scary.
The most critical part of living with that frame isn't turning the struts or doing the physical therapy. It is keeping those pin sites clean.
The pins are the metal screws that pass through your skin and anchor into the bone. Each of these spots is a doorway that bacteria would love to walk through. You're the bouncer. If you become lazy, you could experience a pin tract infection that can be a nuisance or a serious illness that can stop your growth.
Here is how you keep those sites spotless and safe.
Understanding Your New Daily Ritual
You need to accept right now that cleaning your pins is your new part-time job. You cannot skip it because you are tired. You cannot skip it because "it looks fine today." You need to do it every single day, sometimes twice a day, depending on your surgeon’s protocol.
Before you even touch your leg, you need to set the stage. This means creating a clean zone. Wash your hands full time for 30 seconds. Rather, you should just rinse them. Scrub them. Place all your supplies in a clean towel.
Usually you will use the same type of clean-up solution as a glass cup, sterile gauze, cotton swabs, and your cleaning solution. Most surgeons recommend chlorhexidine or saline but don’t stop at just what your team recommended.
The Cleaning Technique
The golden rule of pin care is simple: Never cross-contaminate.
You should never use the same piece of gauze or the same swab on two different pins. If you touch one of those small-sized pins that have a tiny bit of bacteria and then touch another, you have spread the germs.
- Step 1: Soak a piece of sterile gauze in your solution. It should sit there for a moment or two before it was fully wrapped around the pin site. This softens the crust or dried blood. It is essential for this to be important because hard scrubbing on dry skin causes irritation and irritation to more quickly result in infection.
- Step 2: After soaking, wipe the pin with a cotton swab. Take the right place from which the metal meets skin and move across.
- Step 3: Move away from the wound, never toward it. This pushes debris out rather than packing it into the hole.
To Pick or Not to Pick the "Crusties"
This is the biggest debate in height lengthening surgery circles.
As your skin tries to heal around the metal pin, it often forms a crust or a scab. It can look yellow or gold. This is normal.
But some doctors say to leave it because it looks like a natural cork, sealing the wound. Others tell people to remove it because bacteria can hide underneath it. Generally, if the crust is loose and comes off easily with your wet swab, let it come off. If it is stuck hard, do not force it. Picking at a scab until it bleeds is a surefire way to cause inflammation.
Recognizing the Warning Signs
Even if you are perfect with your cleaning, problems can pop up. You need to know the difference between an angry pin and an infected one.
A little bit of redness or clear drainage is often just irritation. This happens because the skin is being stretched as you lengthen.
However, a true pin tract infection looks different:
- Pain: The pain gets worse, not better. It might throb.
- Color: The redness spreads outward from the pin, looking like a rash.
- Heat: The skin feels hot to the touch.
- Discharge: Instead of clear fluid, you see thick, yellow, or green pus.
If you see these signs, contact your clinic immediately. Please do not wait. Usually it happens that oral antibiotics can be necessary to catch it early. Without it, it will spread to the bone and this is a disaster.
Keeping Life Clean
Your environment matters just as much as your cleaning technique.
When you are in the frame for months, there is a need to change your bedsheets frequently. This bed is where your legs sleep for 8-10 hours a night and shed cellulite and bacteria. Clean sheets mean clean pins.
Also, be careful with showers. Most surgeons will not let you shower for the first few weeks. Once you are cleared to shower, do not use the bathtub. Soaking in water is a bad idea. Let the soapy water run over the frame in the shower, and then dry the pin sites thoroughly immediately after. Bacteria loves moisture, so a dry pin site is a happy pin site.
Managing an external fixator during height lengthening surgery is a grind. It is tedious and repetitive. But once you clean those pins, remind yourself that you are protecting your investments. You're protecting your new bone. If it becomes a problem, let it clean, keep it dry, and you won’t feel the infection.