I know you all want the gory details, so here goes…
So last Thursday, I thought I felt the beginnings of a zit on my butt (left cheek, if you care). No big deal; everyone gets butt zits, even Julia Roberts. But by Friday it had swelled up enough that I thought it was a spider bite. I had classic spider bite symptoms — I had a low-grade fever, my nervous system was a little twitchy, you know— but none of them were the serious ones that would prompt me to go to the doctor. By Saturday it really, really hurt, and on Sunday I stayed home and slept instead of going to church because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit on it.
On Monday, I went to work, and it was sore, but I sat on my right cheek when I wasn’t serving customers, and all was okay. I did discover when I got home that whatever this thing was had broken open and was bleeding, so I put a couple bandaids on it and called it good.
By late afternoon I was feeling super lethargic. All I wanted to do was lay around the house and watch movies. Then, when evening rolled around, I developed a higher fever. I was just sort of laying sprawled out on my couch like a sock monkey, not really participating in the conversation that was happening in the room. My sister-in-law felt my forehead and my shoulder and said that I felt like I was twice as warm as she was. I replied that her hand felt really good on my forehead, since it was cool, so she got me a cold, wet washcloth. I had to turn it over pretty much every minute because my head was heating it up so quickly, which was kind of frightening.
I decided that unless it got WAY worse, I would wait out the night and go to the doctor in the morning. My friend Joel talked to his sister-in-law, who is a nurse, and described my symptoms and what it looked like (don’t worry— I just told him what it looked like. No looking at of butts goin’ on here), and she said it sounded like it might be MRSA. But she also said that unless I had a really high fever or tightness in my chest or severe nausea, I’d probably be fine to wait until the next day to go to the doctor and avoid any emergency room fees. So we took my temperature and it was right around 100 degrees, so I decided to wait it out.
Joel went and bought me bandages and tape and all that stuff so I could bandage it up properly. It was fun putting bandages on my own butt, let me tell you. All I’m going to say is that it is NOT in any way a dignified procedure.
I called the doctor first thing on Tuesday morning and was able to get in at 9:30. She looked at it, told me it was draining pretty well but that she’d like to try and get more of the whatever-was-in-there out. She did a culture and sent it off to the lab so we could find out exactly what it is that caused this (I won’t know until later this week), and then sent in her CNA to set up the room for a minor surgery.
Yikes.
So once everything was ready, she had me flip over onto my stomach, ass-up and exposed to the world. Awesome. She told me that the numbing agent (lidocaine) she was going to use on the surrounding tissue was going to burn really bad, and then proceeded to stick me with it 8 or 9 times. I’m not gonna lie; I said a few bad words. I have never, ever felt anything that painful in my entire life. Not even my two dry sockets when I had my wisdom teeth out could compare. Luckily it only stung for like 2 seconds before it went numb, but those two seconds each time were the looooooooongest two seconds in the whole world. I was crying even before the first one was done, but my doctor was super nice and motherly. She kept saying, “I know, honey, I’m sorry. It’s okay to cry” and stuff like that, which was nice.
She went in with the scalpel to widen the break in the skin that was already there without numbing it, because she said I would still have felt it and it would have been just more burny feelings from the lidocaine anyway. By this time I was gasping from the pain. I was taking deep (albeit shuddery and teary) breaths and trying to remain calm but my entire back was tensed up more than I thought was possible.
She was able to drain it pretty well, and then she packed it full of gauze and sent in a nurse to bandage me up and give me a shot of antibiotics in my other cheek, just to add insult to injury. :)
I realized I wouldn’t be able to drive, since I could barely sit before I got all cut up, so I called my brother to come pick me up. I had to just lay down in the passenger seat of my car until he came to get me, and I couldn’t stop crying the whole time, or for about three hours afterward.
Since then, all I’ve really been doing is laying around the house, sleeping intermittently and attempting to update my iPhone to iOS4 with absolutely no result. Today I went to the mall with my sister-in-law for less than an hour and right now I pretty much never want to move again. But at least I’ve got Vicodin to get me through, and two amazing employees who are making sure the shop is running smoothly while I’m gone, so I think I’m okay for now.
