This all started a few days before my birthday, actually, on a Sunday, when Dallas was hit with a thing called a microburst. (See picture, which was in the Washington Post, so it is probably legit.) Apparently these things sometimes get spun out of thunderstorms, and they're made when air that's rapidly rising (because it's hot) reaches a peak where it can't rise anymore and starts to fall in a hurry. The resulting downdraft is strong enough to bring down commercial aircraft, and cause all kinds of havoc on the ground. 60-75 mph winds are not uncommon. (That's just below the level of a small tornado.) Trees get knocked over, roof tiles get pulled off, huge pieces of hail fall from the sky and can break windows, and anyway, it's not a lot of fun if you're underneath it.
We were underneath it.
So there it is, two o'clock on a Sunday and we're staring out the window as bushes and trees whip around, telephone wires sway back and forth and look like they're about to snap, and rain pours out of a sky that was perfectly dry about half an hour before. Thunder, lightning, zapping transformers, the whole nine yards. Then half an hour later, it was gone. The sun came back out. The wind died down to nothing.
None of our trees were damaged, though the neighbors down the street weren't so lucky. No hail damage to the car. No roof tiles missing. But the power was out.
Way back in 2010, this sort of thing happened during an ice storm in February. The power was out for four days. The ambient temperature in the house never went above 61 degrees, and that was with a fire going the whole time. So since then, every time the power goes out, I get the heebie jeebies. Like it might not come back on for days.
Which it didn't.
After the first day, when our local power company began borrowing trucks and crews from Alabama and Mississippi and it became rather obvious we were in for another long outage, I packed Joan off to stay with friends who had power. Joan sleeps with a CPAP machine and really likes air conditioning, so this seemed like a good idea. I stayed at the house with the cats. Luckily, the weather was not bad; I think the hottest it got was 85 degrees. And the cats loved it because AAAAAAAALL the windows were open. Cats love open windows for virtual bird stalking.
So I went back and forth to work, charged my cell phone at the office, sent a smiling bow to the former homeowner who decided that gas hot water heaters were a good thing, and taught myself how to make coffee with water boiled on a gas stove. (I really need a French press. Just for emergencies.) And every day I'd come home to see if the porch light was on or not. It was not.
The third day, which was my birthday, the power company finally updated its map to say that our neighborhood should have power back. I went over to the house at noontime and this wasn't the case. I called their hotline and told them the power still wasn't back on, and they said "hmmm" a couple of times and told me to give it another hour.
That night, when I went home, the porch light was on. YAAAAAY!! So I closed all the windows and turned on the A/C and drove down to Duncanville to pick up Joan, and at 8:00 on my birthday we pulled into the driveway of an air conditioned house with the porch lights on. And there was much rejoicing.
Then I got sick.
It started when I got out of the pool one day. I felt cold and shaky. The water was a little colder than usual, but I thought a hot shower would fix me right up. It didn't. Then I thought maybe my blood glucose was crashing (which happens) and a little Gatorade would fix me right up. It didn't. I spent that whole day wrapped in blankets, trying to stay warm. Joan was convinced I had a fever, but we couldn't find a frick'n thermometer to check.
Oh, and my leg hurt. Which was odd.
So the next day I called in sick to work and went to see the doc. I told her I had a fever of unknown origin and for some reason my leg hurt. She checked the nose and the ears and the throat (the usual suspects). Nothing out of the ordinary. Then she looked at my leg. She told me I had cellulitis. (Actually, based on the symptoms, I probably had septicemia by that point, but on with the story.) She drew on my leg with a Sharpie marker to delineate the infection, which took up most of my right calf. She prescribed a lot of antibiotics and told me to stay in bed with the leg elevated.
Which I did, and so went Monday and Tuesday. During this time I had basically no appetite, which was a problem because these antibiotics have to be taken with food. Two or three bites was all I could manage, so I ended up going back to my Old Reliable, ice cream. Which didn't improve my appetite at all, but I could get a few more bites down because it's easy to eat.
On Tuesday my fever broke, which was good, but by Wednesday, it was becoming apparent that the antibiotic wasn't working, or wasn't working very well, anyway. So back to the doc we went. The doc prescribed me another antibiotic to be taken with the first antibiotic. One of these suckers had to be taken twice a day. The other one had to be taken three times a day, but not at the same time as the first one. And they all had to be taken with food. See above re: no appetite. I ended up having to get up at three in the morning to get in the third dose. So it was get up, make a piece of toast, eat the toast, or as much of it as I could stomach, sit upright for fifteen minutes per the label on the bottle, then get back into bed, elevate the leg and try to get back to sleep. Fun times.
Oh, and my leg hurt. Like, a lot. The only way I could be at all comfortable was to lie on my back with my leg elevated. Going from lying down to standing up was about an 8 on the pain scale, standing for any length of time was about a 7, and sitting down (unless my leg was braced up on something) was about a 5. The doc prescribed Meloxicam, which I took with Advil, which you shouldn't do because potential liver damage, but hey, my liver has basically nothing to do most of the time, so I figured why not let it have a little fun.
By Thursday morning I was convinced I was on my way to the hospital for some IV antibiotics because my calf was still amazingly swollen and looked like raw hamburger. So convinced was I that I packed a bag. We went to the doc yet again, and she switched me to a third antibiotic, which fortunately meant I got to stop the other two. No more three a.m. toast. And, fortunately, no hospital. I only dodged that because the infection hadn't spread beyond the Sharpie marker line. But that was a relief. Hospitals are no fun on the weekends.
I missed a week of work and I'm not sure what the situation is with my time off and so on just yet. I am back at work now, trying to catch up and at the same time not really having the energy to stay late. I am still in a fair amount of pain, still limping around and popping Meloxicam and rubbing aloe vera cream into my still red and angry-looking leg. But the leg has gone back to its regular size, which is good. and it doesn't look like raw hamburger anymore, which is also good. I am still taking antibiotics and will be for a while yet.
So how did all this happen, you ask. Well, according to the doc, it was a "classic spider bite pattern." In other words, a spider bit me, I didn't notice, the bite got infected and then things got out of hand. But it could have been anything. I could have scratched my leg against something that had germs on it. It could have been a mosquito bite, too, that I scratched open and I had germs on my fingernails (bad news; we all have germs on our fingernails). So we don't really know. However, if you get a scratch that breaks the skin, especially if you get it outside, it is always, always a good idea to clean it out with peroxide and maybe put a little bit of antibiotic ointment on it, just in case. Oh, and if you're out with a spider, and the spider says "Let's stop for a bite," just say no.
Anyway, I turned fifty. Cheers!
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