For some reason, in the last two years I have gotten three minor skin infections that turned very aggressive and dangerous very quickly. One was on a knuckle on my hand. I nicked my finger while cleaning leaves out of the gutters on my house. It looked like a little nick. After a few hours it started to look like a spider bite. It swelled and became warm to the touch. The next day I showed it to a friend at work who is an MD. He was surprised by it, and told me to draw a circle around the extent of the redness and to watch it very carefully to see it if it grew. (BTW, he also told me that this is what people died of 100 years ago.) If it did grow, my instructions were to go straight to an emergency room. It did progress, so I called my primary care physician and described the situation, telling him that I didn't want to go pick up a worse bug while I waited my turn behind the gunshot wound victims in the ER. He prescribed me some strong antibiotics over the phone, and the infection cleared in a few days. The second infection was similar, but entered via a plantar's wart on the bottom of my foot. I thought I had broken a toe somehow, but the podiatrist I went to see told me that I needed antibiotics. That fixed it. I think these are staph or streptococcus infections. Googling around, I think I have recurring cellulitis.
Anyway, to the current case. I was on a cross country plane flight two weeks ago on which I idly picked at a little scab on my shin. It may have been where I scraped my shin on something, or it may have been a mosquito bite. A few hours after I scraped the scab, I noticed that it had become tender. You know the rest. When I returned from the trip two days later, I showed the bite/scab/infection to my good friend Bob the world renowned brain surgeon. He told me he would call in a prescription for antibiotics right away because it looked scary. In the two hours that passed between my conversation with Bob and when I took the first Cephalexin, my lymph nodes around my hip on the leg with the infection became tender and swollen. Anyway over the next few days the antibiotics beat back the infection. I documented the whole thing. I also self prescribed a hot pad on the theory that my body was heating up the area to fight the bug and that increased heat my bring increased blood flow and therefore increased infection fighting to the area. I do wonder how I happen to keep encountering (or failing to beat down without the help of antibiotics) infections like these. I am becoming obsessive about washing hands, and I am carrying Neosporin next time I go on a trip. Rebecca noticed that one can see three different pairs of Adidas in the following photos. These represent about 1/4 of my Adidas harem. I don't have any excuse for this behavior.
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1 comment:
gross. you are a thinking man. most wouldn't think about documenting but you document and catalog the whole thing. you are like a curious kid with grown up capabilities.
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