I am not proud. Bring on the pity party

By yesterday morning my right foot seemed to be getting worse, if such a thing was possible.  Never very good at allowing my life to come to a screeching halt, I went downstairs and did a few light shop chores, and when I came back up and took my shoes and socks off, I found that the swelling had spread into the entire foot:

My doctor's appointment wasn't until 12:30, and while waiting for that I did the pushup and situp exercises from the March strength routine; all the other exercises are done standing up, and my foot was in too much pain.

Finally the blessed half-past-noon moment arrived, and I limped into the dermatologist's office fully expecting to be prescribed an antibiotic and sent on my merry way.  Instead, the nurse practitioner looked at it and said, "That looks bad.  We're not equipped to treat that here.  You'd better go to the emergency room."

Sigh... I could have done that on Thursday.

So on I went to the ER at Methodist-LeBonheur Hospital, and that little errand would eat up the rest of my day.  In short, I sat in the waiting room until after five o'clock, my foot throbbing as badly as ever.  Finally they moved me into a back room with a bed to lie on, and after another round of waiting, signing forms, waiting, talking to another nurse practitioner, waiting, eating a hamburger my wonderful mother brought me, waiting, watching an NCAA Division I basketball tournament first-round game, and waiting, the nurse hooked me up to an antibiotic IV drip.  At last, something was happening that would (I hope) make this infection go away.

The nurse practitioner wondered aloud whether she should admit me to the hospital for the entire weekend, but, thank the holy heavens above, she decided not to do that after conferring with a doctor.   She prescribed two antibiotics and a painkiller and let me go.  After one more session of waiting at the drug store, I was home-sweet-home at last.

For you pill-popping enthusiasts who might be wondering, the painkiller I got is hydrocodon-acetaminophen (brand name Lortab), a drug I've been prescribed on several occasions now.  Not only does it not seem to give me any sort of high, but also it does little to relieve my pain in my experience.  Nevertheless, my foot did feel slightly better when I got up this morning; I expect there's a psychological element at work, as I'm hopeful that the antibiotics (sulfamethoxazole and clindamycin HCl) are now at work killing the bacteria that have invaded my foot.

Though getting myself down to the dock is a chore, I discovered on Thursday that I can still paddle in reasonable comfort, so I went on down for my usual Saturday session.  Joe got there about the same time, so we paddled up to the mouth of the Wolf River together, and then another mile or so up the Wolf to the Second Street bridge.  I picked the pace up a bit from the mouth of the Wolf to the monorail bridge back in the harbor.

A good, strong paddling session was just what I needed on a day when I'm feeling a bit like an invalid on dry land.