Glimmerings:
On Saturday, I started getting the red splotchy stuff, and it was really apparent Sunday noonish that it wasn’t going away and my body temp was going up in the area, and so on…so we went off to Edward Hospital in Naperville - to get a fresh set of eyes on the situation, since I had been going npowhere recently with the folks at Good Samaritain in Downers Grove, who admitted they’d run out of ideas on how to treat me.
At first, it looked like I’d screwed up, because the infectious disease person who first walked in was an associate of the guy who had given up on a fix at the other hospital; I explained my dilemma and she said she wasn’t offended, and that she’d get another good infectious disease guy to give it a look.
Note: especially since I have my medical support scattered around in different places, I have to reel off my entire checkered medical history to practically everyone over and over again and highlight what’s relevant and keep them from going into dumb rabbit holes like ‘oh you must be diabetic’. I’m not, but they look at the foot wound that doesn’t heal easily and my weight and just run like heck down that hole.
Anyway, the new Infectious Disease guy came in late on Monday and told me that it was obvious that what was going on was a recurrent strep infection, and that it was probably entering my body through the wound on my foot, and so he started outlining a very different and targeted line of attack against both the foot wound and the step infections.
So, they changed over the IV stuff to ancef / cefalozin, and they’re going to send me home with a heavy dose of penicillin (luckily, I don’t have my dad’s allergy to it) and taking a whole bunch of maintenance precautions to eliminate the flora on my skin that’s causing this and generally de-colonize me. Also, I’m looking into using their wound clinic and podiatrists to deal with healing the foot wound; I’ve run into the limit of my podiatrist’s tricks as well.
Some solution that would shut down this cycle of reinfections and heal my foot would be beyond wonderful.
Final note: the infectious disease people have given their clearance for me to go home today, and I’ll be delighted to go home. My leg is responding very well to the IV antibiotics, and looks and feels tons better. As usual, thank you all for your good wishes, thoughts and prayers.