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On a dishwashing accident, three foot surgeries, and the state of our body politic, a thread:
Ten years ago this Pesach, I was literally barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, when the soapy handle of a knife I was washing slipped out of my hand and the blade went straight down into my foot. (2/n)
Because we use separate dishes for Passover, the knife was fairly new (total of less than a month of use over its career) and very sharp.
The good news is that it didn't hurt at all. (3/n)
The good news is that it didn't hurt at all. (3/n)
I knew right away that I had severed a tendon, because my big toe dangled, unraise-able. (I later learned that the name of the particular tendon that I severed was the extensor hallucis longus, in case you wanted to know.) (4/n)
Having surgery when you are pregnant is a whole trip and a half. I was awake for it, because while they gave me spinal anasthesia to numb me, they don't give pregnant women the usual sedative to put patients to sleep. (5/n)
(Just because I love this part of the story--when the anesthesiologist gave me propofol before injecting the spinal, I said, "Isn't propofol what killed Michael Jackson?" Him, stony-faced: "Not having an anesthesiologist is what killed Michael Jackson.") (6/n)
The incisions healed. The tendon, after some physical therapy, worked great. (Still does.) But the foot remained red and swollen.
Some staph from the surface of my skin had gotten into the wound. And it was inside my foot, staph-ing away. (7/n)
Some staph from the surface of my skin had gotten into the wound. And it was inside my foot, staph-ing away. (7/n)
By then, it was too late in my pregnancy to operate again. So they kept an eye on my foot. I was back in the hospital a week after my son was born for more tests. Aspirated the fluid in my foot for testing, did an ultrasound. Decided on watchful waiting. (8/n)
But staph gonna staph. And one day, three months after my son was born, my foot opened right back up. I will spare you creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon descriptions, but it was creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon territory. (9/n)
So I was very rapidly scheduled for another surgery. (10/n)
Open up the wound. (much bigger cut this time.) Irrigation and debridement (clean out all the gunk.) Insert PICC line (semipermanent IV line threaded through a vein in my arm to my chest, to dump medicine straight into my heart.) 28 days of IV antibiotics. (11/n)
I kept pre-packaged IV bags in the school refrigerator, and would go into the nurse's office during the school day, attach a bag to the external port of my PICC line, give myself antibiotics, and go back to class. Antibiotics every 8 hours for 28 days. (12/n)
The only things I have left from that time are a mess of scars on my left foot, two white dots in my upper right arm, and a story to tell. The tendon repair was a remarkable success (yay, Dr. Scott Ellis at @HSpecialSurgery.) (13/n)
But I'm fine because surgeons cut open skin, excised tissue, infused antibiotics. Closing up that first incision and pronouncing things healed didn't work, when staph was staphing inside my foot. And absent those aggressive measures, I would not have been fine. (14/n)
Any applications to the current U.S. body politic are left as exercises to the reader. (15/15, fin.)
(In case you were wondering about the third foot surgery referenced above: I developed a large Morton's neuroma in the same foot, which Dr. Ellis thought might have been connected to all the trauma. It was subsequently excised uneventfully. I can wear high heels again.) (16/15)
