Posts Tagged ‘health’

Well, that was fun… said no one ever.

I had an appointment with my wound care clinic last week where I was supposed to get my wounds examined, bandages changed, the whole nine yards… except that didn’t actually happen. Not like it was planned, anyway. I went to the building where my wound care clinic is and tried to let myself in for my appointment… to find out that I couldn’t actually let myself into the building because the doors were locked.

I tried to call the clinic itself and the one that’s a town over just to see if they would pick up, but no one would pick up. The sports rehab center one door down from the wound care clinic was nice enough to give me the number of the other clinic in this area, and she even gave me the hospital’s number so that I could call them. No one was that helpful, though. And no one knew why both wound care clinics in this area were closed. The hospital didn’t know why the wound care clinic(s, as we later found out) were closed. I called both of the hospitals that my wound care clinic is associated with, and they were equally confused. My primary care physician’s office was confused as well, given that I could walk a few doors down to get to them, that I did so, and that I explained the whole situation to them since they referred me. I didn’t find out until the next day that the medical director had died and that the clinic could not stay open seeing patients in the absence of a medical director. They will continue to send packages of bandages and wound-cleaning items to me in the interim, and they told me that they would call me once a new medical director had been hired and they could resume seeing patients. Will my wounds be healed by then, though? I suppose we’ll have to find that out…

Has the day finally come here? Has it?

Now that I have been on three different antibiotics, the Staph wound on my leg (well, legs… but only one of them is a major problem, as it’s been much larger than the other) is finally, finally beginning to heal. However, as it heals, a lot of scar tissue is being laid down, which is nowhere near the most comfortable feeling in the world… and there’s the fact that it was deep enough to infiltrate the dermis, which means that nerves in the skin have to grow back. That is nowhere near the most comfortable feeling in the world, either.

So far, I’ve been managing this pain with codeine that my pain management clinic has been prescribing me, but it’s hit and miss as to whether or not it works effectively. Sometimes it does, sometimes it… doesn’t. (And apparently some people can be “low-responders” to codeine and morphine, which I suspect that I am and will be.) When I see them again next week, I’m going to ask if they can put me on something like Tramadol to see if that works better. I don’t need “the big guns” to deal with this as much as I just need something that consistently works to ameliorate pain when I’m doing dressing changes, bathing, or just because. Aspirin and Ibuprofen don’t cut it, and they almost always aggravate my asthma, so even those alternated at max doses are not a viable option. I would be nebulizing most of the day or back on prednisone, and, well…

Prednisone caused this, and I think I need to try to stay off of prednisone for the long haul.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this yet, so…

I still have a Staph infection on my leg. But should anyone be surprised?

It’s begun to heal a bit, and it has gotten smaller, but it is still definitely there. There is still pain to be had with dressing changes. I was given a prescription for codeine to take to manage it, and it has taken the edge off of the pain when I change dressings or when I bathe. It doesn’t take away all of the pain, but it does help!

However, we are now on three months of this thing, and that in itself has gotten annoying.

Taking pictures is a hobby of mine, especially when I’m taking pictures of my children.

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