The past two days have been pretty rough. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to have some time to get all the stuff done that I have been needing to get done, but being completely immobile is hard. Because the infection was in my calf muscle– right where it wraps around to the front area of the shin– standing was not just painful, but impossible.
It was so inflamed internally that whenever I got upright, the blood pressure from gravity trying to move through the inflammation was so intensely painful that I couldn’t handle it. I’ve got pretty good pain tolerance, guys, but wow. I’ve had a broken foot, I’ve sprained my ankles badly, and I even dislocated my kneecap at one point, but I’ve never been in so much pain that it’s impossible to walk. I had to keep my shin elevated above my hip for the first 36 hours or so, or I was in so much pain that I got lightheaded. This meant that moving around in the traditional bipedal human position was just Not Going To Happen, even with assistance.
Unfortunately, my ability to be confined to a bed for hours on end is pretty limited, so I developed a technique for moving around that involved a lot of butt-scooting. I’ve been working on my collar-drag in training lately, so luckily my butt-scooting technique is on point. My dad, who was assigned supervisory duty in case I spiked a fever and died or something, found this hilarious and started moving furniture around into my path whenever I decided I was going to butt-scoot from one place to another.
So I’m three days into my course of antibiotics and they aren’t working as fantastically as one would have hoped, but the doctor did that on purpose– I recognized the infection really early, so I hadn’t even started to become feverish until I was actually IN the waiting room at Urgent Care. If I had waited even a few more hours I would have been in bad shape, but since I caught it early enough, he put me on low-grade antibiotics and told me he wanted my immune system to “work it out” rather than blasting me with a really heavy dose and risking my body becoming resistant to heavy antibiotics. I get the logic, and I’ve always been a proponent to less heavy-duty antibiotic use because of drug-resistant bacteria, but the wait suuuuucksss. He swabbed me for MRSA but it came up negative; it’s not even staph, I’ve got strep in my leg. I didn’t even know that was really possible. Stupid leg, you are not a throat, stop getting strep. Throat, do not get any ideas because I swear to God I will blast you with more antibiotics than you can handle. Bitches.
Today I’m feeling much, much better. Still not anywhere near 100%, but I think I’ll be good to do some lifting tomorrow, as I’m almost pain-free this morning. I should be almost completely pain and inflammation-free by tonight, so maybe I will go do some CrossFit tomorrow (CROSSFIT STOP OPENING UP SORES ON MY BODY). I’m not even contagious because the infection was entirely internal; I’m just sick and it sucks guys.
Oh I saw IronMan 3 last night in an early premier with L and it was awesome, go see it.
