Not Again

It started yesterday and it is still here this morning. My right elbow may have the beginnings of cellulitis. My first bout started while I was in high school. It was in my left knee The original injury to my knee happened when I was standing on a wooden well cover and one of the boards broke. My leg slid through until the narrow opening pinched my knee; scraping the skin off and making my knee swell from the trauma. It scabbed over and healed without any problems.

Several years later I was shinnying up an apple tree and my aunt Violet’s place, with my legs pressed tightly to make the climb. The next day, the spot of the old injury began to swell, get hot, and turn red. It eventually got as large as half of a softball. I was taken to visit a doctor and was immediately sent to Connellsville hospital to be admitted for care and treatment.

The range of antibiotics was much more limited in my youth. There were few if any effective oral antibiotics and the intravenous ones were even rarer. That meant injectable penicillin. The nurses gave to me injections twice a day. As a young person, the daily looming presence of those fat large-bore needles necessary to push the thick, white liquid into a butt cheek was torture. The thick viscosity of the penicillin was increased because it was stored in a refrigerator until it was needed.

I wasn’t allowed out of bed during the entire stay, except for the trips to the necessary room. Youthful energy trapped in a bed filled chamber of horrors is what my young creative mind thought. Soon the pain in my derriere overcame the pain in my knee and the edema and redness began to disappear. As I began to feel better and the days of incarceration grew longer, I was ready for the pardon. It couldn’t come too soon. My restlessness increased.

Feeling more and more like an imprisoned pincushion, I sent a note on my empty breakfast tray, “I’m being held prisoner in room…” I’ve forgotten the room number, but you get the idea. I don’t know if it helped, but I was discharged later that day.