out!
I’m over a week late with this update on What’s Going One Here, so please bear with me. It’s been a difficult time.
The timeline goes like this: Originally, I had serious problems with my left foot; they couldn’t image up anything, but the podiatrist / surgeon knew that something soft-tissue-ish was growing in my foot and creating that sore on the bottom of my left foot, against the left-center edge. Said sore area was way tender to damn painful, and there was a bulge on the side of the foot (not the bottom) that was next to it and likewise quite painful.
So I had surgery on my left foot the day after Labor Day (September 7th) to fix the problem. The surgeon took out a couple of lumps of fibrous tissue, which he thought would relieve the pressure and allow the sore to heal up. This didn’t really happen. The lump in question grew after surgery, swelled a lot more, and got to be 9.5 on a 10 scale painful - and not mitigated very much by strong pain killers.
Around Friday, October 21st, the podiatrist gave up and went on a hunch that the ‘lump’ was inflated with loose fluid, and drew out 40 cc’s of bloody (not obviously infected) fluid. Very quickly after he did, the whole lower half of my foot rapidly became nastily inflamed with a massive infection, and I hauled it and me into the ER at Edward Hospital for treatment the next Monday morning (October 24th).
Sure enough, the cellulitis /infection was stomped with intravenous Zosyn and Ancef over 6 days. Midway through my stay, the podiatrist / surgeon operated again and drained out more fluid and took out a bunch of scar tissue inside that had grown in since the September 7th surgery! Through a lot of this, I was seriously loaded up with Norco and was enduring very serious levels of pain…
I was sent home with Keflex orally (six 500 mg tabs a day for 10 days), as the latest bug was a penicillin-resistant Staph Aureus breed, and have been laid up, with strong orders to Stay Off The Foot. So I’m doing a lot of lying or sitting around with my feet propped up, walking with a crutch or scooting with my Roll-about. But not lifting stuff, and keeping the foot elevated and weight-free as much as possible, with regular bandage changes and so on.
The area had gotten very raw, and a good chunk of my foot looks pretty horrible, but the doc says that he’s seeing plenty of promising signs of healing - especially around the sore, which is fantastic news. All in all, my mangled foot problems have seriously messed me over for four years, and I’m beyond tired of it all.
Otherwise, I’m also making some strides in straightening out my sleep problems. I have had terrible insomnia for a long time, and recently signed up with a new set of docs and meds on this issue;
- more directed attention to things like my CPAP pressures and equipment
- meds to get me to sleep and keep me asleep; I have a bad habit of either not being able to get to sleep or waking up about four hours in and not being able to get back to sleep, and now have Trazodone and Sonata to handle those.
However, being in the hospital with all sots of people going in and out of your room at odd hours (poking you, giving you meds, checking to see if your body assimilates oxygen, and so forth…) means that one’s sleep-the-night -through efforts get hashed up. Add in the pain from the foot - which was severe and is now a lot better - coming and going, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than two-three hours at a time in the hospital.