today my wife saved my life (part three)
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
My arm is coming along nicely. What started as a dot and became a painful nightmare bump is now simply a weeping lesion.
But first, a couple of notes on some good things that happened along the way.
On Friday afternoon, as I made my woozy way home from the unexpected surgery, the five-tries IV, and the 90 minute wait at the pharmacy, I caught a break. Specifically, I went into a Tulley's to pick up some ground coffee beans, and came out with a whole heap of swag. Pity swag it might have been, but it was a non-trivial bag of loot. Four free 50g coffee samplers, a couple of half-price coupons on cups of coffee, a cotton eco-shopping bag, and scarf. All just because I shuffled in looking peaked and with bandages on both arms.
Then yesterday as I wandered home from the hospital on my bike on the hottest day of the year, it had gotten damn hot. "Feels like 47ºC" isn't overmuch fun with the heat bouncing off the road, and I couldn't find a pharmacy that was open and that had the medicine I needed until I was quite a bit past our apartment. But the pharmacy I did find was a well-appointed one that had what I needed within a couple of minutes. It's good to find such alternatives.
Yesterday's visit to the hospital was good, too. The doctor told me that I didn't need to come in on a daily basis any more, and could in fact wait 'til Friday. He also said that the worst of the infection was clearly past, and that I wouldn't need to go on the IV antibiotics again. Hooray! He bandaged me up and sent me on my way, telling me that I likely wouldn't have to clean up the wound myself until I came back on Friday.
Which was all well and good, except that the bandage was a discoloured mess by about five in the afternoon, and that the wound was still obviously bleeding and oozing quite a bit. So this morning I took it off, cleaned the lesion, and put new ointment on it. Then Mari graciously cut me a new patch of gauze and slapped a covering bandage on it.
Here are some photos.
unwrapping the post-surgery abscess
I then prized out the bit of medicated gauze and tried to rinse the area with bottled water. I've since read that hydrogen peroxide is the way to go.
two day old abscess operation wound
The yellow stuff in the photo below is mostly dead tissue.
not sure how deep the abscess went!
I didn't take any photos at the hospital on Monday or Tuesday. But here is a pic from this morning when I cleaned it myself again. No more swelling, no more red skin ranging from my elbow to my wrist, and no more worries about "losing my arm", "infection reaching my heart", or death. As various comments from medical parties had me worrying. In the pic below I'd just put hydrogen peroxide on the thing, hence the bubbles.
no more swelling