Picking up where we left off … at this point my hand had been bandaged by The Manimal, I was on a flight to Ohio, and I can’t say it was the least hungover I’ve ever been.
I spent as much of both plane rides as possible in curled up napping mode and maneuvered around my hand as adeptly as I could. I got to my grandparents house around 7 p.m. on Thursday night where I also found most of the Ohio aunts and uncles over for pizza and family time. My aunt D is actually a nurse so it seemed responsible to have her take a look at my hand and let me know what she thought.
The initial reaction was along the lines of ‘Ooooh. That doesn’t look great. When did this happen?’
To which I had to vaguely reply ‘Sometime between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m. last night…’
‘Oh, I see. So drinking had nothing to do with this.’
(At least she laughed.)
She made me try another round of washing it with soap and water, upgraded the bandaging situation with some actual antiseptic and real bandaids and suggested that I maybe head into an Urgent Care at some point to have a doctor look at it, if, for no other reason than to make sure it was thoroughly cleaned out. (I’m a wuss about scrubbing open wounds.)
Since there were no open Urgent Cares at that point in the night, I waited until the next afternoon to head in. (In light of having already blown the stitches timeframe, I wasn’t really in a rush.)
Urgent Cares sketch me out a little bit so, when I looked the one we were heading to up online, I also read the reviews. There was a whole lot of ‘The doctors that work there think they’re a lot better than you.’ and ‘They completely effed up the billing situation.’ While none of that filled me with confidence at least it all seemed unrelated to the quality of the care.
I got there and I’ve got to say the reviews nailed it. I have never had a doctor so openly disapprove of everything. She was horrified that she had to pick little bits of paper towel out of the cut. (‘What is THIS?’) (Better than cotton balls, lady.) She couldn’t understand why the cut was kind of damp and kept telling me that if I had sweaty hands then I needed to change the dressing 3 or 4 times a day. (I don’t have sweaty hands. I just thought it was best to leave it covered, even when it got a little wet from my washing my hands.) I didn’t mention the use of peroxide. (Aunt D had already scolded me for that and I was kind of reaching my ‘tsk’ quota from the blond lady doctor.) She couldn’t comprehend why I hadn’t come in earlier and she definitely spent a good 15 minutes frowning at me and my hand while she cleaned and assessed it.
Interestingly enough, she didn’t seem super concerned about tetanus, even though I couldn’t remember when my last shot was. (I was ALMOST sure it had taken place in the last 10 years.) She actually was pretty dismissive that I was worried about it but said that I could do ‘whatever made me feel most comfortable.’
I did learn something interesting about tetanus though … you have a 72 hour window after your rusty puncture wound to have a shot for it be effective. (I was about 40 hours into the window at this point.)
She did prescribe me antibiotics for a week just because ‘hand infections are nothing to mess with’ and she definitely had no faith in the quality of the care up to that point. She had the nurse put my thumb in a splint that I was told to use for 3 days to help keep the cut from breaking back open and sent me packing.
I was, at this point, also late for a date with two of my all time favorite old college friends but I was starting to worry about the potential tetanus situation. I didn’t mention that part of the decor of the Urgent Care room I was in were a couple of gruesome pictures taped to the wall of limbs that tetanus had eaten (or something) along with statistics on tetanus fatalities. I’m more of an over-worrier in these moments than a non-worrier so I figured the least I could do, while I was heading to meet the girls, was to track down any potential tetanus record.
I started by calling Bozeman Deaconess hospital where I found out they couldn’t release any medical records to me without written consent (which I obviously wasn’t in Bozeman to give) and that’s when I started getting a bit … emotional. So I can’t get my records from you right now but I only have THIRTY TWO HOURS LEFT to figure this out before I DIE. This system is flawed. My options were either to have them fax me a consent form. (FAX?) Or, I could call the Urgent Care I was just at, have THEM request my records from Bozeman Deaconess (under a statue of ‘continuing care’ or some such) and then have them call me back and let me know what the status was. (Because that seems logical.)
I called my mom, hoping she could maybe track something down (as she is the ultimate keeper of records) and then called the Urgent Care back and explained the situation. The nurse was SUPER skeptical but I got her to look up the number for Bozeman Deaconess on her computer and she agreed to call and ask. I explained that I just really didn’t want to take any chances, and, although I was once again told that the cut I had was really unlikely to have tetanus, I kept using phases like ‘well, just for my own piece of mind’. I was on the verge of tears once or twice thinking about my narrowing time frame for getting the antidote to my unlikely case of tetanus.
I do think I eventually won the nurse over with my extreme panic about my tetanus shot records though.
She agreed to call Bozeman and get back to me.
My Mom couldn’t find anything out and when the nurse called me back, she said Bozeman had no record of any tetanus shots for me (which means any shot I may have had was over 5 years old). I decided to take no risks and that I would be in the next day as soon as the Urgent Care opened to fend off tetanus.
After all of that, hand in a splint, round of antibiotics, shot to the upper arm, I have to say that currently, my cut is looking pretty unremarkable. I stopped wearing the splint after one day because it just seemed a little over-dramatic and I’m pleased to report I think I’m going to survive.
Planning is for Amateurs 