With all those treatments I told you about yesterday, let's talk about our complementary task--sterilizing all those nebs!! We use a newly sterilized nebulizer cup for each and every medicine during their treatments. The huge concern with CF patients is always bacteria. In addition to the nebulizer cups, we also sterilize sinus rinse bottles and spacers for their inhalers, meaning we are sterilizing almost every day or every other day. The sterilization process is this: separate all the neb pieces, soak in warm soapy water for 15 minutes, rinse, and use a Wabi baby bottle sterilizer for a 75 minute cycle to sterilize and dry.
Xavier and Lucie have cultured different pathogenic bacteria in their lungs over the years, so we also have to be exceedingly careful to keep everything separate. We have separate Wabi sterilizers, separate bowls to soak their nebs, separate containers to store the clean nebs. In other words, most of our kitchen is taken up with some type of equipment or medication for CF!
When we travel, we still have the same daily treatment needs and have to make sure any hotel room we stay in has a microwave for sterilizing everything. In that case, we use those breastfeeding pump sterilizing pouches to boil the nebs for at least five minutes. At home, we also could boil the nebs in a pot, but I have a history of melting them.
Big shout out to my husband for taking on this task 90% of the time--I think he's happy to stay out of the insurance and specialty pharmacy phone calls side of things, so maybe it's a fair trade!