I prefer the boring, quiet weekends...

So it's been an interesting week... last week at this time, I was fighting off some kind of weird malady -- my stomach was feeling sort of off, and then I got a fever and started feeling achy. I thought maybe I was getting the flu, but by Wednesday I was feeling fine again. So apparently I picked up some random 24-hour thing from somewhere. But no matter... everything was back to normal by mid-week...

So I didn't think much of it when Rick complained about his elbow hurting Wednesday night. He thought perhaps he knocked it against a door or a table or something, and just couldn't remember. During the night, I became aware of much tossing and turning from Rick's side of the bed... at around 3 in the morning, he said his elbow felt like it was "on fire," and he couldn't sleep. So he took some Advil, which helped enough that he was able to sleep the rest of the night...

In the morning, he showed me his elbow, which was swollen and red (like angry, seriously peeved red). At this point, he thought maybe it was some sort of bug bite -- but to be honest, I was really hoping it WASN'T a bug bite, because I didn't like the idea of a bug that could cause a bite like that hiding somewhere in my house. An exterminator would've been immediately necessary. But as I looked at his elbow, I couldn't see ANY place on his arm where the skin was broken -- in fact, other than the fact that it was obviously really annoyed about something, his elbow looked fine. No bruises, scrapes, cuts, anything...

But as the day wore on, Rick decided that whatever was going on with his elbow was NOT normal, so he made a doctor's appointment for Thursday afternoon. It took very little time for the doctor to decide that an orthopedic surgeon should be consulted -- she thought it looked like bursitis, which affects the joint, and orthopedists have more specialized knowledge of the issue. But the doctor was unable to find an available orthopedist, so she sent Rick straight to the ER to have the fluid drained from his elbow (ouch).

After four or five hours in the ER, Rick was finally given the okay to leave, with a prescription for pain pills and precautionary antibiotics. (They'd sent the drained elbow fluid to the lab to test for bacteria, and initially everything looked okay.) But as Rick was walking home, he got a phone call from the ER doctor saying that something WAS growing in the elbow petri dish, but it wasn't clear yet how serious it was, so he promised to call back on Friday...

Friday afternoon, Rick called me as he walked home from work and said he needed an overnight bag because he was being admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics. Apparently whatever started growing in that petri dish was very bad (although not quite as bad as MRSA, which is the super-resistant bacteria that's so hard to get rid of), and once he got to the hospital, they hooked Rick up to an IV of Vancomycin. (We read on Wikipedia that this particular antibiotic used to be a "last resort" antibiotic. But now there's bacteria out there that can even survive the "last resorts" so NEW last resorts have been developed...)

At first, I assumed Rick's hospital stay would just be an overnight thing... Faisal was nice enough to give me a ride home on Friday, and then I walked over to the hospital Saturday morning, thinking Rick and I could get a cab home together. But the orthopedic surgeon decided that one more day of antibiotics would be a good idea, so I walked home by myself Saturday evening. He then decided that one MORE day of antibiotics would also be good, so I embarked upon another walk to/from the hospital on Sunday. It's only about a mile walk to the hospital... and even though I'm quite used to walking/jogging three or four miles at a time on my treadmill, I was totally exhausted over the weekend. Each evening when I got home, I thought about making myself dinner, and then decided to just heat up a can of soup and watch stupid movies on the couch (seriously, I actually watched "Wrath of the Titans" one night... it was bad the first time I saw it in the theater, and it was STILL bad the second time...)

But the hospital wasn't completely horrible, as far as hospitals go -- Rick's room was on the top floor of the hospital, which, we found out, used to be the "VIP" floor. And Rick ended up in the room that Michael Jordan used to request when he needed knee surgery... or whatever it is basketball players generally need. So the room was HUGE -- I could've done cartwheels in there. There's also a Starbucks in the lobby of the hospital, so I was able to sneak cappuccino directly into Rick's IV line...

He came home yesterday afternoon, after being given the option of taking oral antibiotics and waiting to see if the infection completely clears up on it's own, or having immediate surgery and just taking care of it. Rick decided on the "wait and see" approach, hoping to avoid the surgery. He'll find out on Friday if that worked or not. 

The view from Michael Jordan's hospital room...

It's hard to tell just how big it was from this picture... it did, however, need a much bigger television set...

Cappuccino has healing properties...

And then this morning, I got the worst news of all -- the cupcake store across the street is CLOSED!! My cupcakes are gone!! No more glimpses of deliciousness through my living room window!! Noooooooooooooooooooooo...

Okay, maybe that's not the WORST news in the world... but you can bet I'll be perusing Google maps tonight to find the next closest cupcake store around here...

Because cupcakes ALSO have healing properties... :)