Reject!

I had an interesting experience with the foot this week. Every bit of it has been healing nicely, (slowly) but nicely. Just as the doctor indicated, right on the schedule he'd predicted.

But then, it started to be sore and look red along the right side of my foot, below the big toe. This was the site of an incision where he'd removed a little section of tendon so that it wouldn't be pulling my big toe outward any longer. He said he'd put in dissolving stitches, so that as my foot healed, the stitches would just go away.

But now this incision site was red, and very sore when I put on my shoe because the shoe rubbed it directly. There was a small, pointy thing sticking out from the top end of the incision, so I wondered if one of the stitches wasn't dissolving properly.

I finally sat down on Thursday evening, with tweezers, and pulled on the white pointy thing, but is turned out just to be a bit of dry skin. However, when I plucked this piece of skin off, it opened a teeny hole, and pus pushed its way out. Hmm...this can't be good. I probed around a bit, got some more icky looking white stuff to ooze forth, and then I put a hot poultice on it for about 30 minutes. That drew out a little more goo, so then I rubbed some antibiotic cream into it and applied a band aid. The next morning, it looked so much better, and most of the redness was gone.

Now, you may be thinking, "Why didn't you go to the doctor the next day? " Because I wanted to go to my family reunion instead. And I had to drive all the way to northern Utah before 6:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon from Las Vegas. Plus, my foot looked a whole lot better.

So, I spent Friday, Saturday and half of Sunday visiting relatives and enjoying myself. Then I got back on the road and returned to Las Vegas, in time to host my son's family overnight on their way to San Diego for a little vacation. They left Monday morning around 10:00 and I did laundry and fixed lunch and then CoolGuy and I went to the movies (Despicable Me---very entertaining!) to get out of the heat.

Then, as we were sitting around watching Jeopardy that evening, I was examining my foot. CoolGuy, aka Attilla the Nurse, asked what I was checking for. I told him the entire story of the redness, the pus, etc. Why, yes, he did have a cow, how did you know? Actually, he pointed out that I've done all this arduous healing and everything is going so well, and I'd put in all this time doing everything else right, why would I mess around with this problem? (!!??)

Really, I'd planned to go to the doctor on Monday if I wasn't completely healed, and then I'd gotten distracted with the visitors, and the movie and stuff. So, that night when I finally sat down and probed around a bit, I realized that it wasn't all better. It was still a little red and sore. None of the other incision sites felt like that, so I should go to the doctor.

And I did today. And he pointed out that sometimes one's body is unhappy with the dissolving stitches and treats it as a foreign body and sends a platoon of white blood cells there to repel the invader. So, the pus wasn't really an infection, exactly, that could be cultured, but it was just a pile of dead white blood cells trying in vain to reject the perceived enemy. He numbed it up, sliced into it with a scalpel and plucked out the offending stitch remains. Then he cleaned it all up with germ killers, and put a band aid on it and told me to stay out of the pool for 24 hours.

So I'm canning peaches I got from my daughter's food co-op in Utah and all is well. Sometimes, the white blood cells get called out on a bogus mission. But I appreciate their heroic efforts. Semper fi.