Mommy's Home!

"Oh boy oh boy oh boy Mommy's home Mommy's home MOMMY'S HOME!"
Photo of my Shmoo-butt, my own.

Dogs really are great for the soul.  Unquestioning loyalty, the ability to love you as though none of your faults exist, and enough slobber for a million puppy kisses are among my favorite traits.  Few people can make me feel as valued as she does.  While always happy to see me even just after a day at work, my Scarlett (aka Shmooie aka Shmoo-butt) was particularly thrilled Saturday evening when my brother brought me home from my 2 1/2 day stint in my parents' care.

A little over a week ago, I backed into the corner of a set of drawers (very delicately, I assure you).  A few days later, I started experiencing intense pain along with bruising & stiffness, consistent with a bruised coccyx (that's a tailbone for anyone a little less posteriorally-focused).  I did my due diligence as an ePatient: trolled the internet - attempting to sort lore from fact, of course - spoke to others who had gone through this experience, and monitored the progression of my symptoms, and concluded it was a badly bruised bone.  Painful, but not much to be done.  Against the concern that I might have broken it and should have it x-rayed, I insisted it wouldn't matter anyway, as the care plan was the same.  This may have also been colored by my less-than-stellar insurance.

Then, this past Thursday I had even more pain (if that were possible), and when I got home from work found that I had bled through my clothes.  Even I can't ignore a problem like that.  So the Daddy Ambulance picked me up and took me to the new urgent care facility in my town (side note- they were less expensive than the emergency department, had no wait, and were closer which was pretty important when I was in quite a bit of pain in the car).  There, I found that I actually had a cyst which seems to have ruptured internally from the hit I took a week prior, and had finally now ruptured externally.  Oh, and the site had developed an abscess (an infection).  I'll spare you the ick, so here's the tame version of the next steps: the PA (physician's assistant) had to perform a minor (yet fully embarrassing) procedure where she made a small incision and tried to rid my of as much of the problem as possible.  For the next few days, I had to follow a few directions to finish getting rid of all the bad stuff, and now I'm onto healing.  She gave me prescriptions for an antibiotic and a pain killer.

A quick side story my chronic patient friends will appreciate: So after going through all my medications & what they're for, diagnoses, how to spell them, and what system they relate to, I'm lying there (on my stomach) listening to what is wrong and how we'll fix it.  Once we agreed on the plan, I had to start sharing my insights.
"You're going to inject something to numb the site?" I clarified.  "Yes," answered the unsuspecting PA.  "Ok, well I don't know what you were going to use, but I can tell you the dentist has had to stop using anything with epinephrine in it because I have a reaction."  "Um, ok," she smiled, "we won't use epi on you."  "Great," I said, then continued "and the antibiotic...I don't know what you were going to prescribed, but I can tell you amoxicillin doesn't touch me".
Hey, if I know it's not going to work, why not save us all the time, right?  But boy does that reveal a lot about my history as a patient!

Naturally, I couldn't care for myself on all these meds and with a fresh incision, and Shawn was out of town attending (ironically) the national student nursing association convention, so my parents turned their house into my own personal hospital ward.  My dad gave up his side of their temperpedic bed since it would be better on my battered bum, my brother dog sat at my house each night, and my mom catered to my ever-evolving dietary requests.

Adding to the fun, the antibiotic she prescribed me (and I believe it's my own fault - I told her not to use amoxicillin after all) ended up DESTROYING my stomach.  Each dose was worse than the one before, and by the 4th round (24 hours of the med) I was curled up on the floor crying.  My stomach was distended, I was nauseous, could barely eat, and was convinced I was dying.  Turns out this med was a particularly brutal antibiotic, but since I had warned her of my resistance the PA reasonably thought it would be a good way to go.  So my mom called the PA back and they came up with another med for me to try.  Even just the knowledge that I didn't have to take the first one again was making me feel better.  Just to be safe, I'm also following her instructions to eat a yogurt with each dose & taking a probiotic daily, and on the whole it's working out.  I also found chocolate flavored Boost goes down well when nothing else will, and alternating ginger ale with root beer pretty much handles the rest.

Shawn was getting home late Saturday night, so my brother brought me home in the evening since (as my mom says) my personal home-care nurse would be arriving shortly.  While my brother's companionship kept Scarlett from full-blown insanity, nothing makes everything quite right like having Mommy home - hence her outburst at the beginning of this post.  After ambushing me with kisses and squiggles, she anchored herself at my side on the sofa.  No chance of Mommy making another getaway!

No, no way.  Nuh-uh.  Not...gonna...happen....  Mommy's...not...allowed...to...move...zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Picture of my sleepy - yet surprisingly on-guard - protector puggy, my own.

Shhh...goodnight, all!  May you snooze in good health!