Now that he is back from vacation, I saw my family doctor this afternoon and he is not a happy camper.
While there, I didn't remove the dressing from the foot because there was so much discharge from it but I had snapped a couple of photos while in the E.R. so I grabbed my Blackberry and showed him those ( I can post one here for anyone masochistic enough to want to see it
). His immediate response was "Jesus Christ son". When your family doctor reacts like that, it ain't good. He said he does not like the idea of the intravenous antibiotics only being for five days (as prescribed by the E.R. doctor) and he wants me on them for
at least an additional five days. At that point he will reassess and decide whether to continue with them or to switch back to pills. He also wasn't happy with the dermatologist who kind of set this whole thing in motion and who then, because it had moved out of his area of expertise, dumped it into my family doctor's lap. He wasn't ticked off about it being dumped into his lap, he was more angry about how little had been done during the week or ten days that he had been on vacation. But at least he is involved now and will do whatever can be done to help. He also won't sugarcoat things - he will be completely honest with me each step of the way with respect to what is being done, what will be done next, and exactly how serious the infection is. He did say that it is lucky that I have never cared about scars because I am almost certainly going to be scarred for life after this. Oh well, I wasn't winning any beauty contests anyway
Although he said it wasn't likely to show much of anything, he sent me downstairs to get the ankle x-rayed and to wait for a verbal report from the x-ray doctor. That came back clear. But he is having his nurse schedule an MRI for me and expects that that will show him more. He also had his nurse get on the case of the specialist wound care clinic at the hospital next door to me. He said that the surgeon who runs that is brilliant and that he is the best person to be taking care of this. Unfortunately, his nurse said that this hospital can be a pain in the arse when it comes to their process for scheduling things. Were I going to the campus of this health sciences center that is closest to my family doctor, instead of the one that is closest to me, they could arrange something with a phone call but that isn't possible with this other campus - which is where that particular surgeon is located. But she spoke to that surgeon's secretary (the surgeon himself is on holidays this week) and between the two of them they are going to get on the clinic's case and get them moving because my family doctor says this is very serious and he wants an expert involved ASAP.
I am due to see my family doctor again Thursday afternoon at which point he will remove the dressings to get a look at the wound itself. He will have his nurse repack and redress it afterwards. She has been his nurse forever and I've seen her for a thousand different things over the years. She used to give me (and my younger brother) allergy shots as a kid (it is thanks to her great technique that I have never ever been afraid of needles) so I trust her implicitly. Barring some sort of miracle recovery, at that visit he will make the arrangements for the intravenous antibiotics to be continued for another five days before reassessing again after that time. He will also prescribe me some more percocet to deal with the pain. And his nurse has said that she will switch the I.V. from my right forearm, where they put it in at the hospital, to my left forearm so as to even out how many days it goes into each arm and, more importantly, because I am right handed so having it in my right arm is a major pain in the arse for me because it is so inconvenient!
The nurse who is coming to the house to deal with the I.V. pump is also changing the dressings on the wound. She realized today that, when they sent the supplies to my house yesterday, they hadn't included the correct material for packing the wound but she improvised with regular gauze and got some of that in there. Thankfully, she had the hands of an angel because I barely felt a thing when she was packing it (the percocet I took 45 minutes before her arrival might have helped
) and the packing of the wound is one of the worst parts of the whole experience because it can be so damned painful. She also decided that she wasn't going to use the dressings that the other nurses have been using - those have the usual padded area but are also covered in plastic to prevent any discharge from leaking through, which made sense when they were changing the dressing every two days. That plastic extends beyond the padded area and has adhesive on it to affix those dressings to the skin but, because of the extent of the damage to the surrounding tissue, that adhesive area has to be applied directly to some of the most infected and inflamed areas of my foot. Instead, she used a thicker pad that covered almost the entire infected area and then used adhesive gauze tape to fix it in place. She said she did that because she wanted the adhesive on as little of the inflamed and infected skin as possible because that skin is already so badly damaged. Hopefully this padded dressing will also be absorbent enough to prevent any of the discharge from leaking out around the dressing (I can feel some of the discharge leaking now but, so far, it hasn't soaked through the dressing nor has it escaped from the edges because I cannot see any of it staining my sock). If it isn't absorbent enough, we can reassess that when she is here tomorrow. Hell, I'd be perfectly happy if she put a damned abdominal pad over the thing just so long as I could get some relief from having anything adhesive directly on the infected and inflamed area.
So the saga continues....
". . . when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
— Samuel Johnson
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2010 & 2012 CTN NASCAR Fantasy League Champion. No lemurs were harmed in the winning of these titles.
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