Emergency Room and Itchiness
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Where do I begin??? Let’s start with the emergency room visit why don’t we?
Since I got the purple cast on, I have had a very itchy back heel, precisely where the pins were inserted.
Well yesterday DAY, I couldn’t tolerate it. It was a pulsating itchiness that would not go away and at one point I over did it and took two pain pills and three benadryl to try and get some sleep. All that did was slow my heart rate down and make me feel very woozy.
By mid morning I called the Orthopedic Triage nurse and she never called back. Surprise surprise.
By three o’clock I was in tears so I called again and demanded I speak to a nurse. I got Cathy, the same triage nurse that I called in the AM. She said to elevate the foot; I had, and put ice on the cast. Well, like a fool, and like the many times before this, I took her word, did it, and nothing happened. First of all, after and hour and a half of icing my freaking cast, which later the emergency people told me you can’t do, all I successfully did was make the pillow sopping wet and my cast wet. I literally did not feel any coldness through the cast. Finally figured out this isn’t working and gave up.
By 5:00 on the dot, I was in tears again. I couldn’t lie down, it hurt and itched, I couldn’t sit down and dangle my foot on the ground because it itched. I couldn’t function. I was a wreck. So at 5:30 my mother-in-law called and got the on-call doctor, Dr. Ayres, to call back. He did within a matter of minutes. I explained what was going on. He said it could be a nerve waking up from the surgery after being swollen and just now is healing itself making the whole foot hurt and itchy and making my heel very tender and pinpointing the itchiness. That didn’t sound like it so I told him a bit more of what was going on. He said go to the hospital, have them cut off the cast and check out the heel.
We get to the hospital. They check me in, they then rape my wallet for $250 for the emergency visit, and then proceed to tell me they CANNOT cut the cast off. I flipped out internally. It was my mother-in-law that told them that the doctor on call told us to get here and get it checked out. They finally took it off. I got literally two seconds of air on the heel, and then they wrapped it. They looked at it and said, “Oh nothing’s wrong”, and closed it up.
I was doing well up until 4 AM this morning when I woke up to SCREAMING pain in my heel. I tossed and turned from then on to 7:30 when I finally gave up and came into the kitchen and called at 8 to my orthopedic surgeon’s office. They said they needed me to get in at 10:45.
Well, remember my previous entry about my Mom. So after debating who would take me, I called my Mom, who said it was out of her way to come pick me up and then drive out to the doctor’s office and waste all that time. She finally said she would pick me up. Well, Todd, my husband, drove me to her house and that made her happier. But I didn’t live it down for her missing Bible study this morning. Whatever.
My mom and I get to the doctor’s office and they say my appointment is TOMORROW at 11. I freak out. I said, “No this is an emergency appointment.” “They called me to confirm.” So they squeezed me in at like 11:30. I finally saw him at 11:45ish. He looked at the heel and rubbed it, and if I could have purred I would have. IT FELT SO GOOD FOR HIM TO RUB THE ANKLE!!! I was in heaven!! He looked at it and said it’s NOT infected. The heel is a complicated thing. There are not enough fat reserves in the heel, so what I had been basically feeling is the nerves healing and coming alive back from being stretched and poked and prodded. He wrapped me in another cast, which is black in color. I felt so good for him to look at it. It relieved a lot of my anxiety. He also put me on Ultracet for pain and two Benadryl as needed for the itchiness.
Thank goodness if was nothing serious. I feel a heck of a lot better. They put extra padding in the cast for the heel too.
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