The year of the spider:
Back in 2002, i was fresh in the navy. I still loved my command (and the empire) and had full confidence in their abilities to take care of me. I was 19 years old and a bit naive about the world around me. Little did i know, that i would turn 20 in incredible pain. Looking back it is impossible to imagine how i lived the way i did for so long...
In early spring of 2002, i woke one morning and the back of my leg hurt! I limped to the mirror and saw a huge red dot on the back of my thigh and went into the hospital immediately. It was already starting to turn darker as i sat down to wait my 4 or 5 hours to been seen. It burned to sit because of the pressure on my thigh so i spent a good chunk of that time pacing.
When i was finally seen, the doctor drew a circle around the now very painful and inflamed spot on my leg then wrote me a prescription for a broad spectrum antibiotic. He told me that it looked like a spider bite and that he suspected that during the night, i had gotten bitten. At the time, i believed him. I've always been fascinated with insects and arachnids (they are truly some of the most amazing things on our planet) and i knew that the bite of some spiders can go unnoticed.
So i faithfully took my horse pills and went back to the barracks where i was living at the time and told my roommate what had happened. She and i pitched in and rented a steam cleaner and steamed the crap out of everything. We even checked out an extension cord from the main office, pulled our cars around, and hit those up as well. Just in case.
I spent the rest of the day in pain, constantly checking my bite to see if the redness had grown outside of the line. Sure enough, in only a few hours, it had grown larger than it had been before. Antibiotics can take a while to build up in the system so i figured i would give it a while to do so and until then all i had to take for the inflammation were giant pills of Ibuprofen.
The very next day, i woke up in incredible pain and another small welt on the back of my leg. This one felt very very tender and it took me a great deal of time to sit up and put my pants on. I decided not to wait the week like i was going to and i went in to have my new spot looked at.
Like playing tennis with a brick wall, the doctor said that it looked like another spider bite and here is where the fun begins. I got another round of antibiotics because he assumed that i was allergic to the ones he gave me (i've never been allergic to anything and to top it off, they were only broad spectrum). He said that the new ones should do the trick but told me to keep an eye on it and come back in if another one popped up.
To make a long story short, more came. First they covered my right leg, then my left and every day was agony. I was constantly tired because of the drain on my body and it was so painful to sit up in bed that i had to have a very good Marine friend come over and help me out of bed. He came every morning that he could make it and help me get around while my body woke up. I was able to sleep at night but barely and that was only thanks to the gigante (giant) ibuprofen that they were giving me to stave off the pain. And no, i never once got anything remotely stronger than ibuprofen...but i was taking around 1600 milligrams three times a day just to function.
The only thing that felt good was direct, searing, heat. I constantly had a heat compress on my legs whenever i got a break at work. I was able to function but how i did is still a little mystery. Looking back, those days blurred from one painful day to the next. You would think you'd get used to it, but every new day would bring fresh painful swelling.
6 months passed of this before i was seen by a dermatologist. 6 months of weekly visits to the doctor and having them tell me that it was just a spider bite. 6 months of constant waiting and waiting and waiting and canceled appointment after canceled appointment. So it finally the day came where i could talk to a specialist. He cleaned a lot of the swollen vacuoles out and took several samples (i never did get the results) and took my blood pressure. I was excited because i thought that i would have an answer.
This prick...he took one of his many books off the shelf, flipped to a couple of pages and showed them to me before asking, "Does it look and feel like this to you? What do you think?" What the f**k do you mean, 'what do i think?' I haven't been to medical school, dickface! I thought you'd know you prick! So we went through the book together (reluctantly) and thought we'd found the answer.
Nope. Not even close. It took me another 5 months of constant pain, canceled appointments and waiting to figure out that i had something relatively common: MRSA. Oh, but i didn't find out from a doctor. Noooo... i had to find out from my aunt who had had it before. She said that when she had it, they quarantined her and gave her so many antibiotics that she built up immunities to many of them. I looked it up online and there it was. The thing that i had.
So i took my new found knowledge and went into see the doctors again. I told them what my aunt had told me and what i'd found on WebMD and we started a round of very powerful antibiotics. I'm now allergic to them, but after another couple of months, the MRSA died off and i went back to normal.
Of course, the MRSA is linked to bringing on my asthma years later. Or so i've been told...
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