One little mosquito bite…

Now, it’s around Halloween, while waiting in line to enter the Chinquapin Swimming Pool (where we were checked for COVID and distanced from one another), one of my swimming buddies wanted to know what was going on with my leg.  I looked down, saw nothing, and said it looked like nothing.  And, so it went.

About two weeks later, I was eating dinner with a good friend who also asked what was going on with my leg.  I looked down, saw nothing, and said nothing.  But, she whipped out her phone and took a picture of what she saw.

There was this nearly 5 cm deep pit in the center of a 20 cm long cellulitis episode.  Or, so we thought.

Having alerted my physician, I was scheduled for an emergency ‘look-see’ the very next morning.  As I walked in, the physician’s immediate response was this was not good.  He took samples and immediately sent me to the local hospital where I began receiving a series of intravenous antibiotics to get whatever this was under control.

Over the course of the next 36 hours, I was cooped up in the emergency room, being pumped and dumped (with antibiotics and drained of blood).  I underwent a series of IV infusions, blood draws (enough to leave me anemic!), doppler flow tests for my legs (to ensure that there was sufficient blood flowing through my arteries), chest X-rays (as far as I can tell, this was just done to raise my hospital bill), and a few pokes and prods for which I might have missed the reason.

Why was I in the emergency room for so long?  Because there was no room at the inn (i.e., a hospital bed) due to COVID-19 issues.

The emeregency bay next door had a woman who was threatening the life of her police escort.  The room across the way had a man who was in constant pain.  And, given that this was the emergency room in the hospital, it was not atypical that my antibiotics had already drained into my body and the alarm was sounding that it was time for the next dose – or to be disconnected from the IV.  So, it was not surprising that a series of blood pressure interventions were also necessary. (You try staying in an emergency room for 36 hours while a woman in the next cubicle is screaming at the top of her lungs to let her go, to stop harassing her, etc.)

Given that this was COVID pandemic time, there were no hospital rooms available.  So, I signed myself out of the hospital and arranged to meet an infection specialist to get this under control.  (We still had no clear diagnosis.)

Step by step…

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