I'm back.

Happy National Dough-Nut Day!

Whoa.

Okay, I totally didn't mean to disappear.  The deal is: Last Sunday, I noticed a tiny red mark on my calf.  Tiny.  Like an ingrown hair.  Totally insignificant. 

Monday, it looked a little irritated, so I put some triple antibiotic ointment on it and covered it with a Band-Aid so it wouldn't get irritated.  

Tuesday morning, I woke up and discovered that my leg had pretty much blown up.  Red, swollen, seriously ouchy, the works.  Called the doctor.  He diagnosed a staph infection, gave me antibiotics, and told me to come back in two days if it wasn't better.  It didn't really get any worse, but I wasn't sure it was getting better, either, so I went back on Thursday.  He agreed with me, and referred me to a surgeon for the next day (Friday) to have it "cleaned out".  (Don't think about that too hard.  It's pretty gross.)

The leg actually looked better on Friday but I went anyway, because it was definitely not the kind of thing I wanted to ignore.  The nurse practitioner shot the leg full of lidocaine and actually cut out a small sliver of, um, meat.  It turns out there wasn't actually a pocket; it was just sort of an infected sponge of . . . leg.  I have to say, though: Lidocaine is amazing stuff.  I could hardly tell it was my own leg they were dissecting.

We stopped at Texas Art Supply and I rewarded myself with a Schleich kitten trio for not freaking out at the surgeon's office:

This is so detailed, it even has an actual kitten underneath, not just a creepy flat surface:

They sent me home with pain meds and a wound-care routine, which made me super glad I used to be a veterinary assistant so stuffing antiseptic packing into open cuts doesn't freak me out too much.  It also made me glad for Tramadol.  My dog takes Tramadol for arthritis pain.  Now I know why she's been in such a good mood lately.  And why she sleeps so much.  

I had orders to stay home and off the leg so it wouldn't swell up again.

Sunday, I got righteously sick.  I don't know if it was the pain medication, the antibiotics, or something unrelated (like a touch of food poisoning) but the on-call doctor prescribed something else so I could at least take my medications.  Two out of three meds caused drowsiness, so I pretty much slept for four days.  Mom commented on how bright and clear my eyes are.

The nurse practitioner gave me an A+ for wound-care yesterday.  I rewarded myself with Schleich arctic foxes:

I justify arctic fox-related items because they sort of look like my dog.

Today is my first day back.  I still don't know what caused the abscess in the first place.  Popular opinion votes for a brown recluse spider bite, but I'm not convinced it was serious enough to be that (unless it was a very small or very apathetic brown recluse).  I will encourage you not to Google brown recluse bites for comparison: It will give you nightmares.

Also, I forgot to post this guy.  Josef Originals large tiger cub (about eight inches long):