Occasionally I noticed what looked like bits of bark coming out of the wound. My doctor had come back from vacation, and I went to see him right away. I told him the whole story — the original doctor who said it was as clean as it could get without dissection and that the hamstrings felt weird because they were poked with a pointy stick, the salt-baths, and the third doctor who did ultrasound and concluded that there was no foreign body. My doctor said that the “bark” I saw was probably just scar tissue, like internal scabs.
By this time I was going back to the office, but my leg was feeling extremely tight, as if I would pull something if I tried to run. So I decided to go see a physiotherapist. We have some pretty great physiotherapists in this area, and as it turned out, she spotted a new development that had gone unnoticed. A tiny lump could be felt deep beneath the skin, just below the wound, about the size of a pea. She attributed the tightness in my leg to the fascial tissue having been expanded away from the muscles due to the fluids from the infection. She set up an appointment with a sports massage therapist for that night, and wrote a note for my doctor about the lump, saying that it was a possible foreign body or infection.
The massage therapist worked wonders, and I walked out of there feeling practically cured. I started running, skiing, rock climbing and doing yoga again. My leg was weakened, but I quickly regained strength. However, the wound refused to heal over, and continued to leak fluids all day and night, including, occasionally, what looked like bits of bark…
To sum up the next month and a half: I went back and forth to the doctors office several times, and he didn’t think that the lump could be a foreign body, because an ultra-sound had already discounted that. So he swabbed the fluids from the wound, and sent them to the lab to test for infection. They came back negative every time, except once in January, after he tried poking a syringe into the lump to suck out some fluids. Not much came out, but the sample he had tested came back with trace amounts of bacteria. He sent me to see another physician, who is a general surgeon, for a second opinion on the situation.
The lump in my leg had become more pronounced. When the surgeon felt it, he immediately said, “There is definitely something in there — it feels like a piece of wood”. He told me to make an appointment for an ultra-sound with a real radiologist. I didn’t realize that the doctor who did the previous ultra-sound wasn’t qualified to do so!
My doctor managed to get me in to see a radiologist at a clinic in Calgary within a week. It would have been a month long wait for a radiologist at the hospital. At the clinic, they immediately saw a foreign body 3.7cm long and 1cm wide. Also apparent to the radiologist was the path that it had taken through the various tissues. The branch had penetrated the subcutaneous fat, the fascial layer, and several muscles, into the biceps femoris, where it broke off. That explains my complaints about a weird feeling in my hamstrings! Over time, the stick had moved back out, toward the skin. The lump that could be felt was the end of the stick…
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