Health issues

This story starts some time in last July. I noticed that my large toes on both feet were quite a bit more sensitive than usual. Upon examining them, I found them to both have fairly nasty ingrown toenails. They both became infected, and I went on antibiotics. The antibiotics were mostly effective at eliminating the infection in my left big toe, while my right big toe remained infected. Since I couldn't get an appointment with a podiatrist before my planned trip to Ireland in early August, I went to urgent care and had part of the nail removed on my right large toe. My hope was that this would remove the ingrown portion, allow the infection to drain, and get all this resolved before my flight to Ireland. My left big toe was, at this point, merely ingrown.

Unfortunately, my trip to urgent care left me noticeably worse off than I started. They managed to take part of the nail off on my large right toe, but there were complications. The person actually removing the nail (let's call them Tim) turned out to be extremely inexperienced, and the nail itself turned out to be quite brittle. Instead of cutting cleanly, my nail came apart in narrow splinters. Tim saw this and decided to stop the procedure early, repeatedly telling me that he did not know what he was supposed to be doing in this situation. His superior responded to his questions by telling him to use his own discretion, a comment which appeared to fluster and confuse Tim. Keep in mind that all this is happening in front of me, so I'm not exactly feeling confident about Tim's competence. He had also not succeeded in actually numbing me (largely due to the level of infected tissue), so I felt every tear he made with his knife and tweezers, as well as every time his hand shook while injecting me with nerve blockers (which was quite a bit). At the end of the day, the nail was in worse shape than before the procedure. Instead of being ingrown, the edge of the nail was now in a serrated pattern that was sharp to the touch. Furthermore, the toe is still infected a month later.

After getting back to school (and having the infection return to my left large toe), I went to the school medical staff for antibiotics. They prescribed me a generic version of Augmentin, an antibiotic which helped somewhat with the infection. Coincidentally, they also found that the one of the numbing agent injection sites from my surgery had itself become infected. Thanks again, Tim.

Everything started looking up after I started the Augmentin. I felt itchy sometimes, but thought nothing of it. My feet were recovering. Today, however, I woke up to find myself covered in hives from head to toe. I have hives on my neck, behind my knee, all over both arms, all around my waist, on both of my inner thighs, and basically everywhere else I've checked so far. My hands are so swollen that I have difficulty moving about half of my fingers (making this somewhat difficult to type), and my skin feels like it's on fire. Apparently (according to my school physician) I'm allergic to Augmentin.

So there you have it. My health is a bit of a comedy of errors at the moment, and I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'll try and get a music post out this weekend, but I'll probably wait for the hives to clear up.

Hope your day went better than mine did, and I'll see you next time. Until then, Guitarman out.