The good news is that after 6 days, my wife is finally home from the hospital. The lesion on her knee is shrinking and she is slowly regaining normal mobility. The bad news is that I now have a small lesion on my arm. I can’t exactly sit here and blame her – in hindsight I was likely the carrier to begin with. I had already had a couple such lesions that I dealt with and moved on. Maybe it is something that I inherited from my father, but it didn’t really occur to me to seek medical attention over the matter. I was acutely aware of the wounds (they seemed like nasty boils) and I would monitor them, treat them as it seemed appropriate, and at times when I considered that I might need to actually see someone about it, I’d decide to wait another day to see if it got better. And gradually it did.
Now I have one on my arm just south of my elbow and given what my wife has been through, she is not going to sit be and let me rationalize my way through this one. So she insisted that I go to the doctors office and they put me on antibiotics. According to the doctor, she believes that there was only one MRSA related death in the past so-and-so years in the US, but she suggested that I should try to avoid becoming a modification to a statistic. I cannot fault that logic. I’m sure the meds are going to do a number on my digestive tract – they often don’t sit well anyway and this one is particularly rough. But it is a small price to pay.
I am also in pain for other reasons as well. For one, I have a strain injury in my hip from a couple years back that tends to flare up every once and a while (e.g., when I exercise my legs hard, when it is about to rain). Secondly, I spent a good portion of my wife’s hospital stay being very busy at home and not only because of the kids. Luckily I had plenty of help with the kids – the first few days my mother-in-law would give me breaks in the afternoons to get things done like disinfecting our house and maybe fitting in a visit to the hospital. Then my mom drove up from NC to help out for the weekend. The latter became the catalyst to a lot more work.
See, my family is a bunch of doers. Every weekend there are projects to work on. Every vacation there needs to be an action-packed itinerary. I was always the black sheep. I never really rebelled per se, but I have always been more prone to taking a more laid-back approach to life. So it is not really an option for one of my parents to just hang out for the weekend – there need to be things to do (either in the form of activities or projects). This weekend, it was a mix. We took the kids a number of places, and in between and while they were sleeping we took on home improvement projects (e.g., install new lighting in the dining room, paint the kitchen and the hallway). The end result is that the kids had a fun weekend and the house looked very nice for my wife’s return … and I’m tired and sore. So now I will head up to bed to saw some logs next to my wife (sorry, honey).