Round Two

Well, as much as I appreciate a doctor willing to lance the finger of a patient he doesn't know, it did not work. I don't mean to sound so bitter, but it is kind of annoying. I had to go back in again yesterday. (That would be the third time.) Only this time, I had to go into urgent care/ER. My hubby came with, and we are kidless because my parents take them a week every summer, and the timing just happened to be perfect. There we met the funniest person I have met in a long time. He was my nurse, and told me that I was a strange case (according to the triage nurse) and he was like House, (I have never seen that show, but my dad loves it, so I at least knew what he was talking about!) Apparently, when the triage nurse asked if our tetanus was up to date, and Chris said yeah, we just traveled to Uganda, it sort of made her panic a little bit. But the other nurse in the room was just was extremely nice and thorough and super funny. The perfect combination when you are panicking a little bit about your finger. Then I met my doctor, who sat me down and asked me a million questions about what happened to my finger and what I do for a living, and really looked at my finger and turned it around and put on this weird contraption on his head to help him see it up close. Basically, the doctor who lanced my finger on thursday didn't do it right. He also shouldn't have switched my antibiotic, and didn't give me the correct dose. Not to mention he made me panic over superbugs and all that stuff. (Or as my dad said "Apparently your doctor was a nimrod." I tried to give the doctor the benefit of the doubt, he was very young and didn't really look older than me. But that didn't make my dad happy either, and he told me I needed to screen the doctors I saw much more carefully! It is nice to see that my dad cares.) Anyway, the ER doctor said you never lance on the side of a wound like he did, because it doesn't really do anything besides create tissue damage. What you do is (if my last post made you a litte queazy, you might want to skip the next couple of sentences): you get this little fancy tool that has a hook on the bottom. Then you use it to pull up underneath the cuticle at the bottom of your fingernail, you raise it up as much as it will go, and then you jab it through the membrane and into the area that is swollen. Then if you need to lance more, you go in through the first jab cut with th e scalpel, and slice the skin horizontally, not digging in as deep as you can like the first doctor did. He said the important part when lancing a cut is to go in where the infection occurred (where I pulled the hangnail out) not some random place that is swollen. Then he had me swish in a medical solution, gave me a bunch of info. on finger infections (basically it says don't pick hangnails) and sent me on my way. He also said he sees cases like mine all the time, and that the clinics don't see as much of them, so they A. make a bigger deal out of them then what they reallly are, and cause patients to panic, and B. don't really know how to lance them because they don't have the experience in it. At the very least, it is a good reminder that doctors can't be experts in everything, and sometimes you need a second opinion. What an experience! The bummer thing is it sounds so dumb! All that time and money and scare over a hangnail. At least if I had broken my arm or something else it would have seemed worth all the effort! Oh well, I finally found a doctor who knew how to deal with it, and I am very thankful. Plus, I got to sleep in until 8:17 this morning! That hasn't happened for years! My kids are of the get up at 6:00 variety. I have the next four days to do whatever I want- it is almost overwhelming! I am sure I will think of something to do!