The next day, my leg looked slightly pink, and slightly swollen. I didn’t really know what I was looking for — it wasn’t really red, and it was only a little swollen. But it was painful to move around, and I didn’t feel like going through the whole ordeal of getting to the hospital again, especially since it was probably nothing. Besides, I had work to do. Luckily, I sit at a computer all day for work, and I can work from home. That day, I sat on a pillow, in my home office.
The following day, my leg was definitely red and swollen. It was swelling up like a balloon. I went to the hospital shortly after waking up, and a nurse said, “Oh ya — it’s definitely infected.”
A different doctor, this time, came to see me. She was amazed that the first doctor didn’t prescribe antibiotics right away.
Any time you are stabbed with an organic object like a tree branch, you are almost guaranteed to get an infection. Always get antibiotics.
She prescribed two kinds of antibiotics, removed the two smaller stitches “so it could drain”, and told me to take four salt baths per day, to encourage the fluid to flow out.
I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of daily salt baths with “fluid” draining from my swollen leg. Antibiotics are also not very good for you, and I now had ten days of them to get through. I was really hating that first doctor, and myself for not going back to the hospital the day before.
The infection got worse over the next two days, and my doctor was still on vacation for another month. So I returned to the hospital. I saw yet another doctor, who said the same thing that the second doctor had said about being impaled with organic objects — antibiotics should always be prescribed. He removed the final stitch to help with the drainage, noting that my thigh-modeling days were probably over. I told him that my mother would be pleased. I asked if I could get an x-ray to see if there are still bits of wood or something in my leg. He said that wood wouldn’t show up on an x-ray, and instead pulled over an ultra-sound machine.
He ran the ultra-sound probe around the area of the wound, pointing out the fluid build up on the little screen of gray static, which somehow, doctors can (supposedly) discern intelligible forms. “No foreign bodies in there”, he said, wiping the translucent slime from my skin. He agreed with the previous doctor when I asked about salt baths, and also suggested elevating the leg, because the fluids would travel down the tissue planes in the direction of gravity. By this point, the tissues from my crotch to my knee were packed with ooze from the infection.
The pain went away after a couple of days, and I could walk around, although it was still swollen from the infection, and feeling increasingly tight. As the weeks went by, I took salt baths, and tried to keep my leg somewhat elevated as I worked. The fluids continued to drain, especially in the bath, and I was going through a lot of bandages…
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