Early last week, Jill noticed that she had a small, zit-like infection on her right leg close to the shin. Having seen a few zits, abscesses, and assorted other pustules in my day I recognized it as having the appearance of an infected hair follicle or possibly an ingrown hair (Jill has a natural propensity for getting bitten by insects so I didn't rule out the possibility). I felt confident in my diagnosis because you don't have a beard for as long as I've had mine without having an ingrown hair or two; I don't get them with any amount of regularity but they do happen from time to time. They're nasty, often painful things. She'd shaved her legs not long before the infection popped up so it made sense to me that this was what she had.
As the week went on the infection got a bit bigger and by Wednesday evening there was swelling in the area as well as some discoloration to the surrounding skin. What concerned me the most was that Jill said she could barely put pressure on her leg without considerable pain resulting. She'd been working on a project in her office throughout the day and I attributed some of her discomfort to muscle strain. Even so, I convinced her (for the moment) that it would pass given time to heal. We went through our normal routine of dinner and dishes before getting comfortable to watch television before going to bed.
To say that Jill was concerned would be a vast understatement. She began looking up information online about similar infections and tried to self-diagnose her wound by comparing what she had to images on various websites. (I tend to do the same when I encounter a symptom or wound that I don't recognize, but the hazardous part of this is that most medical sites will give you more information than you require and tend to make you more paranoid about possibilities instead of confident about prognoses.) Come to find out, a boil, abscess, and an infected hair follicle don't look that dissimilar from one another. Having ruled out a bug bite for the most part, we were both fairly confident in what it was but the pain persisted to the point of her being uncomfortable even with her feet up in our recliner. A warm compress didn't help, either.
Bedtime was upon us and Wifey's mind was running rampant with worry about whether or not her leg was going to rot off during the night. I have to admit that I was concerned but didn't treat the scenario with the same sense of seriousness that she did, which was easy for me to do because it wasn't my leg that was hurting. I deal with pain fairly well, or so I think; Jill is much more sensitive and it didn't take powers of clairvoyance to tell that she was scared, quite frankly.
As we went to lay down, she voiced her concerns. By this point in time it was close to 11 PM. We didn't have any sort of medication on hand that could help her and I didn't know what else to do beyond trying to drain the infection (i.e., squeeze it - it's what I've done to mine in the past). I told her that our options were to either sleep on it and her go to her doctor the next day or that we go to the emergency room to have them look at it there. At first she went along with the idea of waiting, but that didn't last long. A few minutes and a phone call to Jill's parents later, we were out of bed, getting dressed and ready to go to the ER.
On the way to the hospital I made a comment to her that I'd hoped the only time I'd have to take her to the ER would be when she was about to have one of our children. So much for that, eh?
It was a bitterly cold night as we've had some unseasonably frigid weather here recently. (Yes, below 30 degrees counts as "unseasonably frigid" for South Carolina this time of year.) Fortunately for us the ER at Orangeburg's Regional Medical Center was mostly empty. The intake workers were swift and Jill was quickly taken to a triage area to check her vitals before being put into an examination room, wherein we both waited for a doctor to arrive. When the nurse accompanying us to the exam room asked her to put on a gown I reacted out of previous hospital experience by asking if I needed to leave the room. Chalk it up to me being a rookie husband, I guess.
Another nurse came in in advance of the doctor. He took one glance at Jill's leg and said it looked like she had an abscess brewing there. The nurse asked if she had shaved her legs recently; after confirming she had, he said the infection was probably from an infected hair follicle. I gave Jill a look that was an emphatic "I told you so!", and she acknowledged it accordingly. The nurse left and said the doctor would be in shortly, not that we really needed to see him at that point. We got a bit more detailed diagnosis from the doctor - apparently they have a one hour minimum stay requirement for all ER visitors because we waited for close to 45 minutes for Wifey to receive her prescription and first dose of antibiotics.
While she was in triage, the nurses there had asked Jill to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Like I said earlier in this post, Wifey and pain get along about as well as red and black ants at the same picnic. As such, her response to this question was to rate her pain at a 9. Apparently ER doctors aren't bashful about dishing out pain medication (or at least this particular one isn't) because in addition to a script for an antibiotic they gave her one for a fairly substantial amount of Percocet (as well as a few tablets to take that evening). We both thought it was rather absurd (like dowsing a candle with a payload delivered from one of those planes intended to fight forest fires); she never took them or had the prescription for the Percocet filled.
Her concerns having been calmed, Wifey and I were discharged from the ER. We headed back home, returning to our humble abode just after midnight. I think we both slept well, probably more so because of the combined effects of a late night out and the stresses of the evening being lifted off the both of us. Fast forward to just shy of a week later and the infection is clearing up nicely. With any luck, Wifey will get to keep her leg...
- Rob
