Everyday Randomness

Finally Feel Rested & More Troubles For Hubby

I finally got my first full night’s sleep last night. I’ve had so much going on with hubby that I just haven’t been sleeping well, and I finally made it to bed last night about midnight and woke up about 15 minutes ago. It’s so nice to finally sleep so long. I’ve been tossing and turning every night worried about hubby’s leg.

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t been quite MIA, but I haven’t been around my blogs as much as usual. That’s because I’ve had to worry over hubby a lot this week. If you’ve got a week stomach I suggest stopping here, but if you’re interested in what happened I’m going to hide the rest of the story from the main page.

When he went to see the foot specialist a couple weeks ago, I made a point to ask the doctor about a part of his leg that just didn’t look right to me. His right leg, the bruised and battered one, had mostly returned to normal size except around one really deep cut.

I can’t say I’m an expert, but I did go through the sports medicine training program and I worked on enough football field sidelines in 2 years to know when something doesn’t look right. Normal swelling and bruising look one way. Infection looks totally different, and his leg looked infected. The swelling was still present around his ankles, but there was no bruising and he had what looked like fluid building up around the gash. When I asked the doctor, he said it was just a hematoma that would eventually go away, and he told us the redness was from having to put all his weight on the one leg. I thought it didn’t sound right, but he’s the doctor, so we took his advice to keep taking over the counter anti-inflammatory pills (Aleve) and to put a thin layer of Neosporin on the scab to keep moisture in it.

A few days ago hubby started complaining that his leg was tender in the area around the gash, and the “swelling” seemed to be increasing. When I examined it I noticed the redness was worse, and there was definitely more fluid in his leg. Later that day the scab on his deep wound started to fall off, and it was completely gone by the end of the night leaving a very nasty open wound about 1/8″ deep right on the top of his shin. We cleaned it up really well and put another bit of Neosporin on it.

Hubby woke up at 5am the next morning screaming that he was soaking wet. I rolled him over and found my worst fear had come true. When the scab came off it left and open hole for all that fluid to seep out of, so his body decided to push all that fluid out. There was so much that it soaked through the sheets, mattress pad, and mattress. There was such a mess I would guess at least 1/2 a cup of fluid came out of his leg.

I immediately inspected to make sure the fluid was clear. Yellow fluid is normally a big sign of infection, but there was no infectious smell or coloring. Trust me it was NASTY though. I got hubby cleaned up, bandaged his leg, and he went off to work, but came home at lunch complaining that his leg felt like it was on fire and he just couldn’t walk. I called the doctor and he told me the leg was fine. It was just draining, but by the time hubby came home it was nasty looking, extremely red, and the fluid had changed over to bright yellow pus that was oozing out everywhere. We took him somewhere else to get antibiotics, and that’s when I found out about Neosporin.

Neosporin contains Neomycin sulphate a bactericidal antibiotic. It killed bacteria, but what they don’t tell you is after prolonged use it can actually cause an infection. My mother in law mentioned this to me, so we looked it up in our little home health books the local hospital sends out, and sure enough that’s what it said. I started doing research online, and I read it plain as day on the Net Doctor website.

Prolonged use of an anti-infective may result in the development of superinfection due to micro-organisms, including fungi, resistant to that anti-infective.

We discovered that the specialist basically completely disregarded the wound because hubby was basically referred to him only for the broken foot. He should have told us to use Vaseline or A&D Ointment…anything without antibiotics in it, so basically instead of helping he just made the situation worse. By telling hubby to keep the scab moist by using Neosporin, he just caused a bigger problem. Now we’ve got a severe infection to fight. I’m extremely disgusted that a specialist who charges $200 just to get in the door would totally disregard something just because it wasn’t what we were referred for. Thankfully we’ve got a local Urgent Care facility who could rush him right in to take care of the problem.

I did take a few photos for documentation and to send to a couple nurse friends of mine, so I’ve got those available if you want to see how nasty it really is. I’m not posting them here because they are disgusting, but you can see them by clicking here and here.