{CAUTION!!! GROSS-OUT ALERT!!!}...It Was Just a Little Cut on the Hand...

Not being a good blogger about the technical bits, I don't know how to put things *below the fold.* Please take this caution for what it's worth: if you're squeamish at all, you may not want to read on, okay?

What started off a chain reaction of incidents was a cut on my hand.

There I was up at the dig site, in the pole barn. This is a primitive site, as most are. We camp in our tents, circled around a large clearing. There's a pole barn where we gather to eat and talk and play Scrabble at night and hear interesting, short, and always fun, talks put on by the curators or students.

The pole barn has electricity and a nice hot shower. The curator leading the current dig doesn't mind us plugging in our Electrical Stuff. I think I brought the first laptop to the site four years ago. Now there's lots of them. We plug in our electric toothbrushes, cell phones, all that.

And at that pole barn, we eat well. Our curator loves to feed us.

This year, however, the chef reneged just before the dig opened. Oh no!!! But! Our esteemed camp leader, fossil identifier, and general all-around *Go To* (for everything) person, Eureka, is a fine cook in her own right. So she cooked for us through the whole dig, and did a great job.

The kitchen knives in the pole barn weren't very sharp. A young man from Louisiana sharpened them. Eureka told me about this, and I just HAD to brag about something to her. Last summer, in my travels, I acquired a rather ridiculous looking knife sharpener, the sort of thing you see advertised on late night TV for $9.95. And it's entirely unprofessional looking. But boy oh boy, can it sharpen a knife!



So I sharpened her knives even sharper.

Unfortunately, I tend to be unsafe. This sharpener is something you hold in your hand. Since I didn't watch the late night TV commercial that sold the product - I got it used - I'm not sure how you're supposed to hold it as you sharpen the knife.

I bet you can see where this is headed.

So, yeah. I cut myself. Badly.

Sorry, no pix of the original cut. It went through all the layers of skin; I could move the skin back and forth and see the muscles underneath. It was only about an inch long, just deep. It's on the knuckle of my left forefinger, where the finger meets up with the hand.

argh! I felt like a fool and a half.

I washed it and slathered it with Silvadene. Eureka told me where I could find superglue. After I let the Silvadene soak in for a bit, I wiped it dry again and superglued it shut. The cut was so deep it took three to four applications to fill 'er up.

Then I wrapped that hand in some serious padding to protect it and finished the rest of the knives.

The next day, half of the hand was swollen and red. But it didn't feel warm, and it didn't feel like MRSA, which has its own particular pain. As one of the other volunteers said, it looked like trauma swelling, and that's all.

See, they don't like to stitch folks like me. If a wound heals shut too quickly, trapping MRSA germs inside, we usually grow a big icky abscess. As I found out with Poor Mr. Foot, that can be a real mess.

There was really no point in leaving the dig and going to the ER. I did everything they would do, with the exception of a nice big shot of novocaine. I take antibiotics every day. I would have loved the shot, but hey. It wears off anyway.

I didn't want people to know what happened; or if they found out, tried to hide how bad the cut was. I was definitely embarrassed. This is what I get for showing off.

For several days, the wound healed without infection. It did fine until I got home. Then I hit the yard. Way overdid it. A very good idea would have been to fill my latex glove with Silvadene.

Well, hindsight's 20/20.

When this all started it struck me as humorous. Here's where my sense of humor began to deflate.

I felt it the minute the germ entered. Intellectually, I recognize this sounds ignorant and ridiculous. But I can tell when it comes in. I can tell the difference between a MRSA infection and some other kind. It just plain feels different, it has its own particular pain. Every time I've said that, and a doctor doubted me and cultured the wound, I've been right.

Oh God above, I hope I'm wrong this time.

Within a couple of days it was hugely infected and *draining:* dripping clear to cloudy fluid, constantly. I would do all I could to sort of squeegee it clean, but the pus never stopped dripping out no matter what I did. The hot redness would flash up from my fingertip to the wrist, then decrease again after I took my antibiotics, then flash out again....

One exception: I went to bed one night wearing a latex glove filled with egg white. The antibiotic in raw egg whites has done wonders on some of my wounds. The next morning, the wound was bleeding. I took this as a good sign, that the infection was clearing and the blood itself was helping kill off the infection.

Wrong. Next morning, it was back to the messy ooze.

In these two pix, it's almost healed. It looks so deceptive. Like nothing, really. Just a little swelling and redness.

That deceptively innocent appearance is one of the reasons more Americans die each year from MRSA than from AIDS.

You may have to click the pic to see what's happening here. It's draining fluid: as my hand is closed, then opened, it forces the fluid out. The stuff dripping down is the fluid in question. This is what came out again, just after I'd blotted it dry.

We have NO idea what's in there until the cultures come back. But the dermatologist who cultured it, Dr. G, knows as well as I do that it's highly likely to be pus caused by MRSA. Pus isn't always thick and white. It comes in an amazing variety of colors and consistencies. Believe me.

I know this can be awful to hear and to look at. That's why I put that warning up there. It's unpleasant stuff, and it's stuff I have to deal with pretty often. I'm sorry to inflict it on you.

But this is an exceptionally bad situation, for a lot of different reasons.

The infection itself is one. My other hand is already partially crippled from a different infection; I don't want to lose one bit of function in my remaining *good* hand. Something else happened too, a sad incident with a doctor. And last but not least?

Even after my dermatologist referred me to a hand surgeon for immediate evaluation and possible debridement, I've been refused treatment because of the MRSA. Over and over and over, four refusals. Three other hand surgeons were out of town. There's no one else left on my insurance plan. None.

Get this: They told me they won't operate until the infection is cleared. But to clear the infection it needs that little operation called debridement.

It's a perfect Catch-22.

I try to stay calm about these things, take them in stride. But hearing that? It kicked me in the gut. I went through the most incredible series of phone calls, an ER visit to force treatment, shock from my other docs who'd also never heard of this refusing surgery business, offers from them to personally call their hand surgeon colleagues for me...and at the end, it was all to no avail. It's not just the doctors. The surgical facilities themselves won't allow me across their threshold.

And now it's too late.

The infection has closed, trapping the germs inside. The infected area is clearly much smaller. But it's still in there, in the joint and finger and hand. It's still in there and still incredibly painful.

Tomorrow we'll see if I can find a hand surgeon who's both back in town and willing to treat me. Since the wound is already closed, they'll probably wait now, to see if it forms an abscess. If so, the scarring will be far worse than if they'd debrided it last week.

There's lots more to this story, but that's enough for now. It's bedtime for me.

And thank you, all you readers, whether you comment or not. I draw so much strength from you, just knowing you're out there, listening. Knowing I'm not alone.
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