Bin bag showers with a PICC line? Time for an upgrade

Every day our team tests something new that might actually make life on treatment a bit easier, and then we write about it, so you don’t have to wade through pages of “miracle fixes” on your own. 

This time it’s a very un‑glamorous, but very real topic: how on earth to have a normal shower when you’ve got a PICC line in your arm. 

None of us have a line in right now, but the more we heard from friends, readers and nurses, the stranger it seemed that the default answer was still “just use a bin bag and tape it on”. 

⁠So we decided to do what we do best: run a small experiment, talk to people who do live with PICC lines, and see if there’s a better way to handle the shower situation. 

The bin bag routine we kept hearing about 

The story was almost always the same. 
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Before every shower: find a bag, hope it doesn’t have a sneaky hole in it, pull it over the arm with one hand, wrap cling film, tape it all down. Scissors on the side of the bath, towel at the ready, and a sort of half‑yoga, half‑acrobatics session under the water to stop the dressing getting soaked. 

Five minutes of washing, fifteen minutes of faffing. 

 And then the inspection: is the dressing dry, is it really dry? 
 
⁠On top of treatment, hospital visits and everything else, this tiny, everyday task starts to feel unnecessarily hard. 

We tried to recreate the set‑up in the office bathroom (minus the actual PICC line, of course). Even without a real dressing, the whole thing felt precarious: slipping plastic, tape digging into skin, the constant sense that one wrong move would undo all the effort. 
It was obvious why so many people told us they “put off” showers more than they’d like. 

Looking for something better than “just a bag” 

So we did what anyone does these days: we went down a rabbit hole of “PICC shower covers”. A lot of what we found online looked… familiar. 
 
⁠Essentially nicer‑looking bags, very little information about what they were made of, and price tags that felt optimistic for something that might tear after a week. 

 Among all of that, one product stood out because it actually ticked the boxes people told us mattered: a reusable cover called SealCuff® PICC Line Waterproof Protector. 

We weren’t interested in “it looks decent in photos”. We wanted:  

• It has to keep water away from the dressing in a normal shower. 
  SealCuff® has a soft, snug cuff and a shape that properly seals above the dressing, rather than just hoping the bag doesn’t slip. 

• It has to be kind to skin that’s already been through a lot. 
  The cover is made from soft neoprene and TPU, it's latex‑free and described as skin‑friendly meaning no crunchy plastic edges digging in and no tape ripping out hairs. 

• It has to be safe enough to feel ordinary. 
  Non‑toxic, CE‑marked materials are the sort of details that don’t look flashy on a product page, but matter a lot when you’re putting it on the same patch of skin day after day. 

• It has to make financial sense if you’re using it all the time. 
  SealCuff® is reusable and still comes in roughly 28% cheaper than its main competitor, which, over weeks and months, becomes a serious saving. 

What the “upgrade” actually feels like 

When we asked people who had switched from bin bags to a proper cover what changed, the answers were surprisingly consistent. 

Preparation shrank from a whole ritual to a couple of seconds: 
no more hunting for a bag that fits, no more multilayer cling‑film creations, no more asking someone to tape your arm up because you’ve only got one hand free.  

You slip SealCuff® on, the cuff hugs the arm, the dressing disappears under the cover. 
Under the shower it’s quiet – no loud rustling, no tape peeling off mid‑shampoo. 
The focus goes back to the water and the warmth, rather than the worry about what’s happening under that plastic. 

Afterwards, the cover comes off, the dressing with PiCC line is checked, and it’s dry. 

The knot in the stomach, that “have I just made this worse?” feeling, doesn’t make an appearance quite so often.

You hang the cover up, ready for the next time, instead of rebuilding the same fragile set‑up from scratch. 

Are bin bags “wrong”? Not exactly, but they’re not built for this 

To be fair, plenty of people have managed with bags, cling film and tape for years. 
They can work, especially for a short course of treatment or the odd shower. 

But they do shift, they do leak, and tape does irritate skin if it’s on and off constantly. 
When a PICC line is in for the long haul, all those little annoyances stack up, and that’s before you get to the actual risk of a wet dressing. 

SealCuff® doesn’t pretend to be a cure, or a piece of miracle tech. It’s simply a bit of kit designed for a job that most of us have been asking bin bags to do for far too long. 

Why we’re writing about it at all 

We’re not clinicians and we’re not going to tell you how to manage your line, because that’s between you and your medical team. But we are good at testing products, asking awkward questions about what they’re made of and how they’re used, and sharing what seems to genuinely help. 

Over the past year we’ve also heard more and more that some NHS teams have begun using SealCuff® in their own practice, particularly in community settings and home‑care. Nurses told us they were seeing fewer soaked dressings, fewer panicked calls after a “dodgy shower”, and, in general, a quieter, more stable picture around that small but important bit of care. It’s not a magic bullet, but when nurses who see these complications every day quietly adopt something, we tend to pay attention. 

So no, no one on the team is currently on a drip, and we’re not going to pretend we know exactly how that feels. 
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What we can say is that after talking to people who do live with PICC lines, and after looking closely at what’s out there, SealCuff® is the shower upgrade we’d choose for ourselves or for someone we care about. 

If “bin bag showers” have quietly become part of your routine, it might be worth knowing that something better exists. Not to fix the big things, but to make this small, everyday bit of life with a PICC line less of a performance and more of a normal shower again.