It's been a long - but very educational - road I hope never to travel down again.
It all started with a "pimple" in my ear in February 2010. I used a new pair of ear buds in my mp3 player during my exercise workout and it caused an irritation in one of my ears. That irritation led to a little pimple.
The pimple grew enough that it hurt to touch the side of my face or lay down on that side of my head. I asked my husband to look in my ear. He saw a pimple with a whitehead on top just inside my ear canal. He offered to pop the pimple in hopes of draining it to relieve the pressure. It sounded like a reasonable notion at the time so I agreed.
Not surprisingly, that was a mistake.
He used a sterilized needle (the medical, in the sterilized package, sterilized needle kind) to pop the pimple. It was not a pain-free experience but I was hopeful it would help clear up the problem.
But no, within 24 hours the pimple grew so large it completely blocked my ear canal. I could barely talk because it hurt so much to move my jaw even a little bit.
I stopped by a friend's house to pick up one of my kids and my friend noticed swelling on the side of my face. She thought she saw some faint red marks as well and insisted I go to the hospital. I said I'd think about.
“For goodness sakes,” I said through clenched teeth, “it's just a freakin' pimple!”
By the time I got home a feverish chill had started.
That's when I called the doctor's office and had a mumbled conversation with the nurse. She asked if I saw any red streaking. I looked in the mirror and saw red lines down my jaw and neck. I was instructed to get my stubborn butt directly to the ER asap.
If you want to be whisked directly in to a patient room, show up with a swollen jaw with bright red streaks running down your face and neck. Within a minute of arriving in the ER I was in a room with a nurse poking my hand to start an IV. It happened so fast I almost didn't even realize what was happening.
This is when another mistake happened, which took months to figure out and will become clear in a minute.
A doctor was examining me while I was being pumped up with some serious antibiotics. The diagnosis? An abscess gone haywire (i.e., turned in to cellulitis).
The advice from the doctor to prevent this condition in the future? Don't let your husband try to pop any more pimples in your ear.
Yeah, I should be up for a Darwin award. I get that.
I didn't want to stay in the hospital overnight so after some negotiation (and an explanation of the crap health insurance I have with my employer) the IV was capped and taped down for my return visit to the ER the next afternoon.
The next day I received my lab results and a prescription for antibiotics while getting another giant dose of IV antibiotics. During that visit I noticed a rash on my hand and the nurse thought it was likely just an irritation from the tape holding the IV in place. That made sense to me at the time because I have always had sensitive skin.
A few days later my hand was an itchy red mess... and my ear still hurt and my jaw was still red. So I made another phone call to my primary care doctor to explain the freakin' ear pimple was still causing me problems.
After that visit I received yet another kind of antibiotics and was told the rash on my hand was likely just an irritation. I was told to take some benedryl and keep an eye on it.
A week later I was back at the doctor's, not because of my ear, but because the rash on my hand was so incredibly itchy I couldn't sleep - or do anything! – without scratching every second, minute, hour, day.
I can't tell you the embarrassment I felt for calling the doctor about a rash on my hand. First the ear pimple, then a rash. I felt like a hypochondriac with the silliest of ailments.
At that visit my doctor gave me a prescription for a steroid cream for the rash.
A couple of weeks later - I put off another call for what I considered a whole lot of stupidness - I was back at the doctor's office because the rash was worse and it spread to my palm. But my husband had an idea he wanted me to talk to the doctor about. He thought the rash might be a fungal infection because of all the powerful antibiotics pumped in to that hand through the IV. His theory was that the antibiotics killed all the normal/healthy bacteria normally found on hands. He also noted that the rash had not spread beyond that one hand.
The physician's assistant thought it might be a good guess (despite my husband’s track record with the pimple-popping suggestion) and offered another prescription cream that had an anti-fungal/steroid combination.
The rash seemed a little better but by mid-April (that would be two months of scratching/discomfort) the rash was still hanging on and would still wake me up at night to scratch it. I finally pressed my primary care doctor to give me a referral to a dermatologist.
This was the rash the day before I saw the doctor in April. It was looking better than it had in February and March but clearly, there was still an issue in mid-April.
It took less than a minute for the dermatologist to determine the rash was in fact a fungal infection. She prescribed an over the counter anti-fungal medication (with no steroid - that actually "helps" a fungal infection grow) and sent me on my way.
The red part of the rash disappeared after a few days of the anti-fungal cream but my palm still had the scaly, flaky look of athlete’s foot.
I used the anti-fungal on my hand for nearly two and a half months before I decided that was way too long to be on that kind of medication. The infection had not cleared up but I decided to simply live with the scaly palm.
That was yet another mistake.
About a month after I stopped the anti-fungal, one of my fingernails started to get milky white. Then another followed suit. Then those nails started to turn yellow and started growing ridges and lifting away from my cuticles. That's when the pain started. Think pins-being-poked-under-your-fingernails torture chamber activity - all day, all night.
It's the little things that can really make you crazy.
I did some online research and decided to try applying tea tree oil to my infected nails to see if that would cure/clear them. I soaked my nails in the oil a couple of times of day and hoped the natural remedy would return my nails to normal.
My kids complained endlessly about the tea tree oil smell but I told them it was better than the powerful pharmaceuticals I was trying to avoid.
I did this soaking faithfully for a solid month before I finally had to accept the simple truth that it wasn’t working. I called the dermatologist back when the infection continued to spread to a third, and then fourth, fingernail.
A sample of my infected nail was taken during that doctor's visit and sent to a lab for testing to determine precisely what kind of infection I had. I didn't want to mess around anymore with guessing what I had. When the results came back a week or so later, I then had to have some blood tests to determine if I could take the medication my doctor was suggesting. I was in good health and cleared to take the medication my doctor had found successful with my kind of specific infection.
The medication was some powerful stuff and not a walk in the park with it's side effects, which lasted about six weeks. But I believed it was my best option to stop the pins-poking-under-the-nails torture from spreading to all of my fingernails and toes (a real possibility at that point) and the sacrifice of a few lost meals.
Having nasty looking fingernails was not only super uncomfortable, but also embarrassing. Although I like to think I'm not too vain, I was tired of all the questions from my little kid friends (I do a lot of volunteer work with 4H) about my yucky looking fingernails. And I agreed with the kids, my fingernails really did look nasty and gross, especially when a couple of them pulled away from the cuticle and were a misshapen yellow mess.
I was told that I would not see any results of this treatment for up to six months. More likely it would be a year before my nails grew back and returned to their normal health.
I am not the most patient of people so in an attempt to appreciate the baby steps this treatment was going to take, I took a photo periodically of my hand so I could monitor my body's healing progress.
Those photos really did help me see that the treatment really was working.
December 14
You can just start to see the normal healthy color coming in at the base of the nail.
This was about 7 weeks after starting the medication.
January 17
February 9
I am happy to say the medication was successful (even though I lost more than a couple of meals while taking it) and my nails are *almost* back to normal. They aren't quite there yet but if you didn't know me, you'd assume I was simply a nail biter.
Now one year and one month later I am almost back to normal. I debated about this story being TMI but if it can help get the word out to...
* throw away ear buds that irritate your ears and...
* don't allow an IV in your hand until you've explored all the other location possibilities!
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