Two ER Trips Later...

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a small little pimple on my leg.  Fast forward a week, and I had several angry looking blisters.  They weren't painful, just annoying, because I couldn't shave my legs.  Then last Wednesday, the one you see in the picture above showed up.  At first, it was a little spot.  After about 24 hours, it started hurting.  Bad.  I showed my mom, who is a nurse, and she suggested I go to the ER, saying she thought it might be an infection of some sort.  Up until this point, I thought they were from sweating, because they were mostly on the backs of my thighs, and sitting in the van all day, I sweat there.

I put off going to the ER for a couple of days, but by Friday, the pain was bad enough that I went.  The doctor took one look at my legs and said I am fighting some type of infection, and put me on antibiotics.  He said if that blister up there was a little more "well formed" they would have cut it.

Um, no thanks.

After three doses of the antibiotic, I woke up this morning with a nasty rash on my upper legs.  I called my mom again, thinking I was having an allergic reaction to the antibiotics, since I am allergic to penicillin.  She said I needed to go back to the ER, so that's what I did.

Turns out, I have a pretty bad yeast infection.  I thought you only got those on your girly parts, but the doctor said you could get them anywhere.  He said it could be from the antibiotics or that my body is simply fighting the other infection so hard that I will pick up every other little thing.  Fun, right?

So he gave me a prescription cream and another type of pill, so now I am on three different medicines. He also suggested I take benedryl, which if you know me at all, you know how bad an idea that is.  I do not do well on medicines that cause drowsiness, so my mom gave me some children's benedryl, and I took a 1/4 tsp, and at this moment, I am fighting to stay awake.

I just hope that by the end of this week everything is cleared up and I am back to normal.

Horseshoes And Branches And Eyes, Oh My!

Consider yourself warned...this may turn into a really long post.  Ready?

I feel like it has been forever since I have been on here, but I think that is just because I had a very busy weekend, which continued into today.  Let me start at the beginning....

A couple of weeks ago, Junior build a horse shoe, um, what do you even call it?  Let's just say he build the boxes with the sand that you use to play horseshoes at my mom's house.  It is between her pool (that's in the fence on the left in the picture) and the big trees that line the road to the right.  It came out great, and we all love playing whenever we go over there. (which is every weekend here lately) 

Yesterday, we were over there for mother's Day, and Ryan wanted to play.  My sister Colleen and I decided to play with him, but we needed a 4th.  We convinced Kasi to play with us, and while she was cleaning up the game we were playing, Colleen and I took some practice throws.

Well, I threw one of the horseshoes and it rolls into the trees.  And we couldn't find it.  All of us were looking for about 30 minutes, and we never found it.  It was like it disappeared.  But, while we were looking, Junior ended up hitting himself in the eye with a tree limb.  Of course, being a "man", he refused to go to the ER and have it looked at, even though he couldn't see out of it properly.  (everything was blurry)  For the rest of the day, no matter how much we begged and yelled at him, he refused to go, even though his vision never returned to normal.

So, when I woke him up at 2 this morning, he said he was going to go to the ER because he still couldn't see right, and his eye was really, really hurting him.  I told him to call me when he left the ER and tell me what they said.  He ended up waking me up before he left, saying his eye was okay so he was just going to go ahead and go to work. 

I get the kids off to school and crawl back in bed.  (I didn't sleep well all weekend and I was exhausted!)  Not an hour later, Junior wakes me up saying he left work because the lights were killing his eye, and he was wanting me to go with him to the ER.  So I drag my fat behind out of bed and off we go.  We finally got into a room around 9am, and that is when the waiting started.  Finally, around 11:15, the doctor came in.  He looked in Junior's eye, and said he didn't see anything, but it was definitely irritated, and his eyeball itself looked swollen.  He put some numbing medicine in it (which Junior said was wonderful) and then some dye, and looked again to see if he could see any scratches.  He said he still didn't see anything, but he thought that Junior should see a real eye doctor just to make sure.  I told the doctor the reason we were in the ER to begin with was because we didn't have insurance, or any money, so I was worried about seeing an eye doctor.  The ER doc called anyway, and assured us that the eye doctor would see us anyway.

So we drive there (he was actually waiting for us) and when we get there, I start filling out the paperwork.  The receptionist comes over and says that we needed to pay $80 before we could see the doctor.  We were like, um, the ER said you would work with us because we didn't have any money right now, and they said that they were.  Um, well, we don;t have $80, so I guess we'll just go back to the ER and see what they can do. 

So off we go back to the ER, and luckily the receptionist there let us walk right back and talk to the nurse we jut had.  We explained what happened to her, and she said to go back to the room we were in, and she would send in the doctor when he came out of the room he was in.

When he came back in he room, he was clearly ticked.  We explained that we didn't have the money to see the eye doctor, and he said that he really was working with us, because it would normally cost over $300 for the exam.  To which I replied, "when you don't have $80, it's not really working with us".  He said he understood, and handed Junior a prescription for Lortab.  I asked if there was anything else he needed, like antibiotic drops or something, and he said the only thing Junior needed was to see the eye doctor.  By now I was starting to get ticked.  I KNOW that he wasn't an eye expert, but if he didn't see any scratches with all the tests he did, what exactly did he think the eye doctor would find?  I asked if we needed to patch it or something, and he said no.  I asked if there was ANYTHING we could do to make Junior more comfortable, and he said to go home and sit in a dark room. 

As we were leaving, he did say that he was 99% sure that Junior's eye would be fine in a couple of days.  If not, we should go back to the ER.  I felt like asking him what they would do then, because really, if they didn't see anything wrong today, what are the going to find in a few days? 

I know it's hard for people who don't live paycheck to paycheck to understand how difficult it is when something like this happens.  If we had money, we wouldn't have gone to the ER to begin with.  We would have went to our regular doctor.  Now, please don't think that I was expecting the eye doctor to see us for free.  That is is no way true.  We just needed to wait until Junior gets paid on Friday before we could give them a payment.  I don't expect handouts.

So, the end of this story is Junior blissfully sleeping pain free, thanks to the pain medicine.  I am still exhausted, and I still have so much to do before we leave for our "girls weekend" trip this Thursday.  I was going to go to bed early, but then I remembered that Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara is on tonight, and I have to stay up for those.

I am hoping that I can catch up on my sleep tomorrow, after the kids get on the bus. 

Have A NIce Fall?

Last week when I went to the emergency room about my tooth and ear, I fell in the hospital's parking lot. It was raining, and the paint they used to draw the yellow lines became slick. I had flip flops on, and my foot slipped right out from under me. I went down on my left knee, and scrapped it up. The hospital is lucky I didn't get hurt worse, or I would have hired a Personal Injury Lawyer Miami and sued them. To make matters worse, when I walked into the ER and told the receptionist that I just fell in their parking lot, all she did was ask why I was there. She didn't even ask if I was okay.

Some people are just rude.