Off The Cuff

Oh No You Did Not!

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me? on Jul 31 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I cannot believe this. On Monday (28th), my husband noticed a little tiny dot on my underarm and a larger red, hot spot. Since we had doctor appointments on Thursday, we decided to have him look at it then. On Tuesday, the little tiny dot turned into a larger, what appeared to be a blister. It had broken so we treated it with peroxide. I love peroxide to clean out wounds. Very effective… …til now. And the red spot had gotten bigger, the size of a baseball. On Wednesday, we noticed that the red spot had grown again to the size of a softball. We continued to treat it. By Thursday, the spot in the middle had gotten darker. The red baseball turned softball sized spot had grown huge, all up and down my arm from elbow almost to shoulder.

Did I get worried? Not really. It was an infection. That much was clear. I knew the doc would hand me a prescription for an antibiotic that I could take for 7 to 10 days and I was home free. Uh huh. Yeah right.

We were going in to see the doc for our regular follow ups so we did not expect anything to be wrong. I got my yearly EKG. It was great. My husband had had several before and when he got his stent so he didn’t need one. But the doc was concerned about the thing on my arm. I wasn’t…..until then. He said he could not be sure but he thought it was a brown recluse spider bite. HUH????? Color me surprised! Having never had one of those, I had no idea what that entailed…but I sure did find out.

Doc called the hospital to talk to a surgeon. He said that I was probably going to be hospitalized. WOW! For a bite? Okay, I do have to admit that by the time we went into the doctor’s office, I was a bit fuzzy headed and did not really connect with all this. I still am for that matter.

The next thing I know, the lights went out. We were in this back corner exam room with no windows. ACK!! Total darkness. Could not see your hand in front of your face dark. The doc opened the door and said “stay put. You could fall in the dark.” What he meant was, do not move because if you fall and sue me, I will cry and have to pay out big bucks! Actually, I doubt it but he must have been covering his tail a bit.

After about an hour of sitting in the dark, waiting on the doc to tell me all about how I have to go to the hospital and wondering if after all this, I need to do something like….oh I don’t know…hurry!!!! we finally got to go out of the room. The doc said that I could get a couple of prescriptions and go home. Be sure and take those pills and oh by the way, here’s a shot in the butt for ya just for good measure. I needed that!!! Everybody needs a shot in the tail bone once in a while, I guess.

So, now I’m home. The red spot hasn’t really grown but it is really hot to touch. The prescripts are for a couple of really big pills. You know, the “would choke a horse” variety. And I guess we are in waiting mode on this bite of mine. The doc told us to go back tomorrow so he can see what’s up with it.

And now I am going to hunt down that spider and do major damage to him. Or possibly I will find his brothers and sisters. In any case, I HATE SPIDERS!!!! Death to all spiders except Spiderman!!!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!