ER visit

I had to go to the Emergency Room last night.

The entire day went fine.  In the evening, around 7:30 PM, I took a shower.  A couple hours later, we are talking about going to bed.  We are watching television and decide when the show is over it would be lights out.  I noticed I am having a little bit of pinching pain at one of my incision sites.  There are two incisions that are right where the waist band of my pants fall.  So occasionally the pants with elastic pulls on the steri-tape that is over the incisions.  So, not thinking about it, I pull my pajama pants away from my waist.  Ouch!  That hurt quite a bit!

I look and one of the incisions seems to have yellow pus coming through steri-tape.  My first thought was "Why did this have to be a Friday night?"  Seriously, it has all week for this to happen when I could just call the doctor's office, but no, now they are closed for the weekend.

My husband grabs the binder and we review the section on incisions.  I already knew what it said because I had just posted it in, but I really didn't want to do it, so we double checked.  Nope, still says I have to call the after-hours number right away.

I call and get an answering service.  I explain to her what is going on.  She says she will put me on hold while she tries to reach the on-call doctor.  She pops back on the line a couple times to reassure me it won't be long and please don't hang up.  I wait, finally the doctor comes on the line.  His voice is very low and scratchy, maybe he was a sleep?  Plus there was an accent of some sort, so I can barely understand him.  I explain what is going on to him.  He tells me to go to the ER.  But I didn't understand and had to ask him to repeat himself.  He told me again several times, so now it my turn to reassure someone.  I told him I would go as soon as we hung up.

In the meantime, my husband has been feeding the animals, letting Wren (our dog) out to potty, and getting dressed.  Once I hang up, I too get ready to go, because I'm not wearing my pjs to the ER.  By the time we leave, it is a bit after 10 PM.  It is raining and there is so much road construction so we have to detour.  What is normally at 20-25 minute drive took us 35 minutes.

Once we check in at the ER, I notice a sign above the check-in desk that says current wait time for adults is two hours.  I wish I had taken a book.  To my relief, five minutes later someone escorted us to an examination room.  A nurse took my vitals, reviewed my meds, I explained again what was going on.

Maybe twenty minutes later a doctor arrives to look at my incision.  He removed the steri-tape.  That was a bit painful.  Then I get to see a pink gash covered in yellow pus.  He cleans the site, but when he presses on my belly around the incision, more yellow pus oozes out of me.  So he does that for 30 seconds or so until there is no more pus.  He cleans it again.  I can see now that most of the incision appears to be healing except for a small hole where the pus is coming out.  He says I caught it pretty early, the skin isn't red yet, there is no inflammation, an antibiotic should be able to take care of it.  He took a culture to make sure the infection wasn't of an antibiotic resistant strain.  He dresses the wound and asks me to wait.

While the culture is tested, he will call my surgeon to make sure that he doesn't want anything else done.  So we wait.  I fell asleep sitting up.  So I laid the bed down and turned on my side and went to sleep.

At about 12:45, the nurse came back in.  She said the doctor couldn't get a hold of my surgeon.  So he wrote a prescription for the antibiotic and wants me to call my surgeon on Monday.  I was to be discharged.  I left with the prescription.  My husband drove me home.  I slept, and when I got home, I fell into bed.

My husband is awesome.  He drove me and waited.  He was awake that whole time.  He is such a amazing great man and takes care of me so well.  I do love him so.