Some of you may know me from another post i’ve made. well my parents took me to a local gp who attempted to take out my implant and has done a shocking job of doing so. Due to the use of anesthetic which caused my hand to swell, she couldn’t see the exact location of my implant and missed it by a mile. making a pointless incision in my hand and trying to push it out. Was honestly funny to watch. My mum was no happy with how far she was digging into my hand for no reason at all when she wasn’t even in the right spot. Anyways they can’t separate my implant from me as i am now one with it. And funnily enough yesterday i found a HID security scanner outside a public bathroom to where i scanned my xLED and i saw that beautiful white blinking light for the very first time.
make small incision just above or below “the long way”, so at the top or bottom of the tube, not alongside it
for bonus points, place glove on patient and have them pitch the implant up to help guide incision and put pressure on the back end of it so it slides out while the practitioner focuses on cutting open the fibrous encapsulation the body places around the implant. You won’t be able to squeeze it out until that capsule is ruptured properly… well, not unless you are a rare person that never encapsulated the implant and it just moves around freely under your skin… in that case it should come out easily.
I think it should be an easy sell to leave it in; the more you try, the more damage you will do to your hand. More chance of infection, more healing required etc.
My opinion
You are actually better off leaving it where it is.
Glad the removal was a failure since you wanted to keep it. Hopefully it wasn’t too painful and the incision heals quickly for you.
Nice job on finding a reader in the wild to light up your xLED!
I was kind of shocked that the doctor had a hard time. I would’ve figured the doc would do some research before attempting to remove it. Take half an hour googling it at least.
The doc that put the chip in my right hand in June 2005 tried to remove it 4 months later so we could swap it. He dug around in there for 20 minutes trying to get at it, but the problem for a doc is that these chips are fragile glass things you can’t just grip with forceps and yank out like any other foreign object. That means they have to be coaxed out, and only after carefully cutting open the collagen encapsulation pouch they end up inside of… and that stuff is unforgiving. If you have only two hands, this is actually quite difficult.
It wasn’t until I put a glove on and positioned the tag myself with a pincer move (shown in the video linked above) that he was able to actually make the cut in the collagen pouch and the tag basically shot right out because of the pressure I was putting on it myself with my gloved hand. This all took about 15 seconds from the time I started assisting until it was out. Without assisting in this way, I can definitely confirm it’s difficult. I attempted a removal procedure on a friend of mine, and it was a bloody mess. They were unable to assist because of their aversion to blood, so I had to sort of pressure the chip myself and then wield a scalpel one handed through an incision to make it happen… a lot of jabbing and stabbing later, the chip popped out… but it was a bloodbath, and I decided right there that removals were not something I would ever do again.
So… like just about everything… removing an x-series is easy if you do it the right way… if you don’t, then it’s not easy at all. A flex is much easier to remove because you can just grab the thing and yank it out.
