A wound that did not heal for 5 months got better in 18 days

I am currently treating a young man who is 40 years old who has the entire outside of his foot opened up simply because he had a bad infection. And literally if you can imagine the entire outside surface of his foot is missing skin and it has been that way since February.

The principles of good wound care require us to clean and wash the wound every day to reduce the bacteria in the site.

An interesting thing about this man is I was called in by the Visiting Nurse service to treat him at his home because he was homebound and had no transportation had no family members and had no means to get around. I visited him in his home and in fact he was truly homebound. The wound was smelly and bloody and well not something you would want to be around.

The things that we do with wound care is we first clean it well and of course I did that. And then after doing all the preliminaries which includes things like checking the patient's nutrition and circulation and medications the usual things that the doctors do we decided that he qualified for amnion grafting.

So the amnion comes in a big sheet that can be applied to the wound. And of course the next visit to his home I placed an amnion graft to cover the wound.

He is now 18 days into the grafting process. I have applied three grafts to his wound and his wound has decreased by one half in 18 days.

The astounding part of this is this wound was stagnant and did not change for five months prior to using the amnion graft. So in 18 days having a one half decrease in size is just miraculous.

I suppose the message I am trying to convey is that diabetic ulcers may seem very hopeless and there are times when people go months without being able to heal them but there is definite new and very promising technology that is relatively easy to apply even in a patient's home to save their foot and save their leg and ultimately let them continue living a normal life.