The bite of a mosquito or some other insect turned feral on Friday. I woke with a small disaster on my ankle and by Friday afternoon, I was at my local pharmacy, asking if she had anything for it.
She told me she had seen a few like it recently, the mozzies are mean this late late Spring and suggested anti-histamine which I didn't quite feel was right. She sold me some cortisone cream and suggested I draw around the edge of the redness. If it continued to spread, I would need a doctor. I knew that but had never thought of drawing around the edges of it.
So I drew around it, applied the cream but by bedtime, it was a bit hotter and I wasn't enjoying the feeling of air on the skin there. Saturday, preferring to ignore these things, I applied the cortisone cream and pottered about but in the back of my mind my experience with cellulitis.
Years ago I barely escaped an antibiotic IV and hospital which, in retrospect, may have been simpler that complete bedrest and 6 courses of antibiotics, 2 at a time.
Retrospect ... everything is so much clearer then.
I decided not to be a baby (because this New Zealander is tougher than tough, in a chickenhearted kind of way sometimes) and went shopping with Gert in the afternoon, we had errands to run but my throbbing ankle made me take a look mid-shopping expedition. The area was a bit too red. Gert sent me out to the car and finished up, then we wandered over to the emergency doctor ... with me still humming and haawing about it all. You really had to prove you were injured or sick when I was growing up. That kind of thing sticks. 'Was I just being neurotic?'
The doctor took a look and reassured me that it wasn't cellulitis but that it did need some attention. That I could ice it if I wanted to, should cover it, and must take antibiotics.
Antibiotics and I have a history. They often affect me worse than the thing they are fixing. So I woke up this morning, the heat had gone out of the area round the wound and it has turned a big corner but, by crikey, I feel miserable. 18 doses of antibiotic to go ...
So I'm bed-resting and reading today and have some excellent books next to the bed. Paul Kelly's How To Make Gravy is superb. And I'm playing his A-Z soundtrack as I devour it... it's the music he writes his 100 chapters of book about. I couldn't travel with this book, it's a monster but tightly written. Nothing boring yet. He's an old hero of mine. His Midnight Rain is the song I have loved best for years.
I found a TED talk Paul gave about the book ... with a song too. It might give you a sense of what I love about him and his music so I added it at the end of this post.
I'm also dipping in and out of The Letters of Vita Sackwille-West and Virginia Woolf, another huge book that is best read lying down. And then, in those other moments, different mood, I'm reading the third in a favourite series of mine ... Marlena De Blasi's The Lady in the Palazzo.
It almost makes the stopping and resting thing okay.