I stand poised to begin work again tomorrow, and I'm very glad. I was very lucky - twice.
We are not among those who were satiated with holiday this summer, but it was a great summer nonetheless. My son was born, and my daughter started talking up a storm, and we went back to Canada to celebrate my nephew's first birthday. Since he was born 2 months early and is now everything a one year old boy should be, I have nothing in the world to complain about.
But boy am I glad August is over.
My August started a month ago, on the 4th, a friday, while I was biking to work. I crashed - and without going into details - I was very very lucky. Concussion, short term memory loss. road rash. Ambulance ride. ER. CAT scan. Discharge same day. Scared the hell out of my poor wife - I'm sorrry. My friends Joe and Paul were there and helped me through the day - I am very grateful. Nothing more serious.
or so I thought.
Unfortunately I believe I picked something up in the ER.
something called MRSA. It's a bacterium; the flesh eating kind. 20 days later I was in another ER after thinking I had a couple of bad spider bites that weren't responding to antibiotics. Thankfully the ER doctor diagnosed the MRSA, cut it out, and put me on two different "oh you have the big boys!" antibiotics to kill the little buggers. It took 4 days of pain and daily outpatient checks before the infection started to turn. Then another week or so of being knocked on my butt after doing anything other than lying down. That would bring me through the end of August.
I am very glad to be going back to work tomorrow. I was lucky. After I got this, I heard about many people who've had these bacterial infections and been hospitalized for weeks, antibiotics injected into the muscle or through IV, had feet or legs amputated or died. Before I got it, I'd never heard of Staph. Maybe I did once on House. But it certainly never occured to me that "normal" people get it.
One thing if you happen to stumble on this post. If you get an infection - these infections look like pimples with lots of red around and are hot and painful - get it checked out by a doctor - immediately. There are forms of Strep and Staph that will kill you. fast. They aren't just in hospitals, and they apparently kill tens of thousands of people per year. I read somewhere that they kill more people in the US than AIDs and breast cancer combined. And you never hear about them. So you don't think about it.
I was lucky twice in August. Looking forward to a good september.
Recent Comments