THE SAGE OF THE SPIDER BITE

I didn’t quite know what to expect yesterday going into my angiogram. I had a basic concept of the procedure but when I got in the procedure room and on the table, it was like I was in Marquis de Sade’s torture chamber. They started strapping me down to the table where conscious sedation would be used. I guess no wiggling is allowed! So you know me I couldn't resist asking which one of the six or seven people in the room was the dominatrix. OMG! That’s all it took! Those people erupted and off it went…

So the procedure went well, but no blockage was found. They used a device called a mynx to plug my femoral artery to stop the bleeding and I swear they used a sledge hammer to put the mynx in. No joke! I'm sore from my waist to half way down my right thigh. An interesting thing about the procedure is that they go in from the opposite side. The bite is on my left ankle and my whole right side is hurting today. My left underarm even hurts today and I have no valid reason for that. It feels like someone grabbed me hard by the armpit. My right side of my neck feels like it got tweeked somehow. I think they may have had a squad of little kids jumping up and down on me while I was unconscious. On the up side, I get to be a lady of leisure for the next several days. 

Because the doctor found no blockage, he now wants me to have a MRI of the area because he thinks it may be an infection in the bone that’s preventing the wound from healing. I just hope the MRI is a little earier on my body than this was! [lol] So the saga of the spider bite continues…

ITSY BITSY SPIDER

As I worked outside in my yard in early January, I got bit by "something" on my left outer ankle.  I never thought much about it until months later when it didn't heal and started to get worse. The bite was located so I couldn't get a good look at it straight on so I started taking pictures of it periodically to compare to see what it was actually doing. I'm no expert, but to me it looked like a spider bite. It would appear like it would start to heal and then it would break open again and that process kept happening repeatedly. 

Around July, I decided it was time to have my primary care doctor look at it because I'm diabetic and although wounds do heal slower for diabetics, I figured six months was more than enough time for anything to heal. She immediately told me she was sending me to a vascular surgeon to have him evaluate it. I got all the particulars on why she thought that was necessary and it made sense so off I went to wait to hear from the vascular surgeons office.

It took about two weeks to get a call to set up an appointment. Yesterday I had my appoinment with that doctor. With much trepidation, I envisioned him poking and prodding my wound, but none of that happened. When he and his PA entered the room they both asked me questions, examined the wound and they both felt the pulse in my foot. I showed them the pictures I had taken of the wound and they agreed that it was a spider bite. The doctor stood back and told me I have no pulse in my left foot. He said I was going to first need an ultrasound done which they did of both legs and blood drawn to prepare me for having an angiogram done that would be scheduled for Friday morning. Hopefully, the angiogram will restore the blood flow to my foot so the wound will finally heal.

The moral of the story is: Don't delay getting wounds looked at assuming they will heal on their own without any assistance (BUT I had it looked at in the ER in June and they said it looked fine! I guess because my foot wasn't falling off it looked fine to them! IDIOTS!) And this goes with double or triple caution if you're a diabetic because you can end up losing a limb. I am in no way completely out of the woods yet and that scares me.  The reality of the situation really is a slap in the face and an eye opener. I need to be more careful. The wound still needs to heal. I'm just thankful it was caught in time to restore the blood flow to my foot to give it a chance to heal.