I hate Nature - or - why is Gia trying to kill me?

About two weeks ago i developed a small zit like blemish on my right hand. i know that doesn't sound very exciting and well it isn't. I show my wife thinking nothing of it and proceed to try and pop it.

no luck, oh well.

later in the week i notice the small blemish is turning into a larger blemish.

OK, may be easier to pop now. no still no dice.

put a band-aid on it and try and ignore it.

it's now Saturday and i decide to go to the home show and see if there is anything fun to do there. not really. look around at the dozen or so HVAC contractors, spa peddlers, plumbers and door/window manufacturers. nothing to exciting.

I notice that i have a mild itching coming from the general vicinity of my right pointer finger. having not put on a band-aid today because i didn't think it was needed i examine the now even larger blemish.

this is odd, looks like a bite of some form. when i get home i confirm the suspicion with my wife. yep that looks like a spider bite, and call poison control just for some advise. they tell me to soak in Epsom salts for 5-10 minutes every 4 hours to speed the healing along but everything looked right on track for it being OK. just watch out for read tracking.

apparently bright red veins are a BAD thing.

well stupid spider. wish I'd seen it bite me or at least been able to squish it

About the same time i have a sore throat and developed body aches and chills. not putting 2 and 2 together i start taking DayQuil with little effect. after a few days i catch on to the wonders of prescription strength Ibuprofen and miraculously my throat feels better and everything else seems to be better too. my hand is still swollen and tender but seems to be holding up.

so about a week after the initial bite I'm feeling good enough to get a little work done so i decide to install my mother-in-law's arbor in her front yard. I dig, i measure, i level, i buy and move 240 pounds of concrete, (twice). by the end of the day my fingers are yellow from the sweat and the unlined yellow gloves I've been working with all day. taking the right one off was quite a chore since the band-aid covered would is still there. feeling OK otherwise.

later back at the homestead it's bed time for kiddos and i notice red streaks running from my wrist to half way down my forearm.

uh-oh.

no pain from that though.

Pulling off the band-aid showed an interesting little addition. instead of a small zit like blemish was a black necrotic looking swollen mass of bleck.

uhm what did poison control say again.

Dammit don't remember.

call again.

Spider bite - yeah
red lines -yeah

ER! - crap.

call Mom to let her know we're dropping the kids over for the night and going to have a romantic getaway at the local hospital.

Joy.

we get to the hospital and the lines are now to my elbow fun. I also cannot even touch the area with my jacket without unreasonable amounts of pain. we finally get seen by a triage nurse take vital signs blood pressure's a little high - really? my hand is swelling, i have God-only-knows what toxins running up my arm and I've been waiting for 2 hours. i may be under a little stress ya think?

but hey on the bright side i did finally get to watch Armageddon.

another hour later i finally get to the inner sanctum, a private room with a bed and everything. more time passes and the doctor or nurse practitioner or shaman or witchdoctor or someone finally came in and checked on me.

that looks like it hurts, here let's squeeze it and see if we can get goo to shoot out. no little ooze? OK we'll use that and make a culture.

By this time the red lime has passed my elbow and is half way up my upper arm - that's bad right? Also my hand is very swollen and rather gross looking.

OK time for IV drugs and immobilization of the hand.

finally.

so i get a bag of antibiotics, a shot of some non-narcotic pain killer and a tetanus shot, just for giggles.

while this is going on the nurse proceeds to try and fit my right hand into a left-handed brace. when i point this out the nurse looks quizzically at the brace like it's the first time she's seen one and proceeds to look at her own hands to verify that the thing was in fact for the wrong hand.

15minutes later the nurse returns with the correct arm brace and proceeds to wrap my hand now we just have to wait for the antibiotics to finish dripping.

Finally at 1am we get to leave the hospital with samples of wonderful vicodin and a prescription for not 1 but 2 powerful antibiotics and 1 prescription for the aforementioned vicodin.

i slept well that night.

so slowly but surely the swelling has gone down and the red lines have disappeared. the black has been replaced by white and that then replaced by loose skin which dried out and peeled of during a bandage change.

my doctor decided to keep me on 1 of the antibiotics for an extra week, of course it's the one in a gelcap.

you can still see the spot where the infection is still hanging on, it is greenish yellow and about the size of a pencil eraser but getting smaller. I now have pretty much full motion of my hand again still a little hard to open my pills but that's why i got married ;-)

now as to why nature sucks.

i am just getting over a major infection (cause by nature) only to have nature attack my sinuses in an completely unprovoked pollen attack. i have spent the day sneezing and blowing my nose.

I hate nature.

completely unrelated: my hand is starting to hurt. i think I'll take a vicodin and go to bed.

Changed my mind.

As many of you know my dad is a teacher. OK, many may be stretching it a little, since I think only my wife reads this (and then only after much whining and crying by me.) Any way dad = teacher. He works for a college in Washington state and as such has access to academic versions of software. I have been running Windows 7 on my machine since before it was released as beta and now I actually own a version of Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit. Yay! academic discount.

I actually like the final version of 7. very responsive and loads fast on my rapidly aging P4 platform. (see prior post) I had to dump Vista earlier last year due to the fact that when i tried to sync my Blackberry or Zodiac or headset or something with my bluetooth radio the system mysteriously and permanently de-activated it's self. No background, limited Internet coverage, much suckage.

So back to XP for me.

Everything is happy in XP land but there was a stirring deep within, a certain ..... "I'm bored let's see if we can multi boot this bad boy."

Wow, that was remarkably specific.

Now i have a copy of partition magic, i just can't find the key, and since we have moved i have kind of given up on ever seeing a lot of things for the foreseeable future. so off to google i go. and to my joy i find:

Easeus Partition Master Home Edition

maybe I'm overstating the importance of this, but i was able to split my main drive into two partitions and

1) not completely destroy my Windows XP setup

-and-

2) make enough room for Win7.

I had a Beta version of 7, or maybe it was a release candidate but anyway I installed it and everything is running OK. for the most part i was just running on XP since i was working and was not sure if the software was win7 compatible.

anyway back to the academic software since i had a final release hologram imprinted genuine happy version i installed it on top of the pre-release software. all happy.The only problem i have right now is the Sound Blaster 5.1 Platinum keeps throwing an error since it is not supported in anything higher than XP and I'm too lazy right now to open my case to pull out the card. I just ordered a new DVD burner so i guess I'll fix it when that arrives.

I actually have pretty much migrated to Win7 permanently but i had something on my XP partition that i needed, so booting to XP it took forever to run. I think I'll stick to Win7. but will keep my XP installed at least until i have to reinstall when i upgrade my motherboard. I'm thinking I'll go with an AMD platform this time.