When It Rains.....It POURS!

Well, as if it's not enough that my darling wife and I are concerned about her grandson, I have a small medical issue of my own that just popped up out of nowhere.

Thursday night my right index finger started to get sore, and since I use lots of hand tools, all the time, I just wrote it off to getting old.

All day Friday at work I was soaking it in ice water, as it had started to swell, and it looked like blood was pooling under the nail.

Now I've smacked my fingers before with hammers, and gotten various wood and metal splinters embedded, but even though this looked similar, I've suffered no 'mechanical' hand trauma.

Saturday morning when I work up, my finger looked like a big purple sausage stuck on my hand.

Oh, boy......my wife took one look at it, about passed out, and said "Get Thee To The Clinic!", or something similar.

Thankfully they weren't busy, and the doctor saw me in about 10 minutes.

After poking around, feeling it, and squeezing it (ouch, Ouch, and OUCH!) he said I had some sort of bacterial infection, and he'd have to "Open it up and drain it", which just about made me pass out on the spot.

I gotta tell you right now, I'm a coward when it comes to pain, ESPECIALLY when it concerns my hands, and the sight of my own blood just about turns out my lights.

He said "Well, you can come back in two days on Monday to have your own doctor do it, but I guarantee it will be much worse, and delaying it is not good".

Groan.......

I gave him the go ahead and he went to get some stuff.

He swabbed it down with Betadine/Povidone, numbed it out with Ethyl Chloride, which is a type of freeze-mist for skin, lanced it, and squeezed it three times to get the gunk out. He also collected a sample for the lab to examine so they could find out what kind of bugs caused it.

He prescribed Keflex  to knock out the remaining infection, and Vicodin "as required" for the pain.

And they gave me a tetanus shot, as my records showed me as not having one since 2004.

It sure feels better, the swelling has gone way down, and it's no longer a purple sausage hanging on my hand.

I won't be using my trigger finger for a while, but I don't really need to when I assist my friend with the NRA classes.

We also went to see Bill Engvall at the Terrace Theater last night. He did a whole bunch of new material about getting old and cranky, along with some "Here's your sign" jokes, and his story about flying with the US Air Force Thunderbirds.

Laughter *is* the best medicine, and for a few hours last night we were able to just put the world on stand by, and have a good time.