October 18, 2005
-
Healing Progress
I had just taken my insulin but hadn't started fixing breakfast when my cell phone rang. It was the Wound Care Center, asking me to come in ninety minutes earlier than scheduled. Impossible! It would take me half an hour to drive there and, with insulin freshly injected, I had to eat breakfast first. We compromised on me coming in an hour early, at 10:00. Delia would be unable to accompany me, having just washed her hair and having it all wet.
Last week they gave me a little plastic slipper to wear with the cast. I abandoned it as soon as I determined that my regular footwear would fit over the cast with no problem. I didn't want them to know I wasn't using the equipment they supplied, so I donned the slipper for the drive to the clinic.
I drive an old car. It has stick shift but the slipper was on the right foot, leaving a normally-shod foot for the clutch. The slipper is wide, though, and I was constantly pressing the gas pedal whenever I tried to brake. You use the brake to slow down, the accellerator to speed up. If you press both together, you get mixed results. There wasn't much traffic, but we were suffering our first rainstorm of the season and some of the drivers were skittish. I had to be exceptionally careful to arrive intact.
I arrived at the clinic at precisely the newly scheduled time. I spent most of the next hour waiting because they weren't ready for me.
Last week, the ulcer measured 42 mm. by 20 mm. This morning, it measured 7 mm. by 3 mm. They put me in a new cast anyway, wanting me to heal completely before allowing me to return to normal. The scraping they did wasn't as painful as before, either. I learned that the dark paper they placed directly over the wound was silver foil, to prevent infection, and that the gummy white paste they spread on my leg before starting to wrap is a moisture barrier.
Reyes checked where I said a spider had bit me last Thursday evening, just above the cast in back of the knee. I had been applying hydrocortosone cream since the bite and it had healed completely, leaving no evidence of the damage. We had a brief discussion of what kind of spider it might have been. I doubt it was a black widdow. We get lots of those non-web-spinning hunting spiders, and I suspect one of them got me. Reyes told me that the hydrocortosone was exactly the right treatment to use for the problem.
We went over my blood chemistry, which was nearly perfect. My blood sugars have crept up and my A1C (blood sugar average for up to the last month) was 6.5, considerably higher than the 6.1 just two weeks previously.
It had started to rain. I had to cross a large puddle to get to my car. My clean new cast got soaked on the bottom. With rain actively falling, some drivers became crazy, either slowing down too much or speeding up unsafely. The car has no heating or cooling because all of the ducting has deteriorated. I had to drive with the window down to keep the windshield from fogging up. I was even more cautious than before. I had no problems arriving safely.
I'm not suffering much pain, despite the necessary scraping of the wound. I'm not going to convey that fact to my family, though. The doctors have told me that I should always keep my leg elevated, but it's hard to do so if they don't think I'm suffering.
