YAERV

That’s Yet Another Emergency Room Visit. Sigh…

Tonight at around 8:30 pm my dad decided to turn off the AC so he asked us to open the windows. I went into the guest room and while opening the window, stepped on a cheap plastic stool, and tripped. The tripping part was fine. The stepping part was not. There was a connector between the legs to strengthen the stool and it had a sharp edges. The edge sliced into my foot, right where the fourth toe connected to my right foot. Due to my neuropathy, I didn’t feel the cut and proceeded to bleed all over the carpet upstairs. I only noticed when the blood was soaked into the carpet by my bed and my foot was sticking to the carpet. There was a lot of blood.

Anyway, I called my parents for help and for the next 2 hours, we tried to stop the bleeding to no avail. The cut was pretty deep; my dad thought he saw white (bones?) in the wound. Since it was 11:00 pm by this time, I could only call the 24/7 nurse line at our work clinic health provider. A nurse answered and I showed her my foot using video chat. She recommended that I go to the ER since there is a short window for good sutures and my cut looked like it needed to be sewn closed to stop the bleeding. Ugh. Meanwhile, my parents were trying to clean up the carpet as much as they could.

So at 11:30 pm, my dad drove me to the ER. I thought the wait was going to take a long time but they called me in at around 12:30 am. The ER wasn’t too busy; there were about 15 people in the waiting room. Once I got into an examination room, a nurse came by to unwrap my foot. Then a physician assistant came by and determined that I definitely need sutures. After another 20-30 minutes, he came back and took about 15 minutes to sew up my toe. It felt like between 10 to 20 stitches to close up the cut. Since I wasn’t dying, they quickly discharged me afterwards so we got home around 3:00 am. I wasn’t able to sleep afterwards and sat in bed until 4:30 am when I had to get ready for dialysis. It was like pulling an all-nighter in college, except with less soda and more blood.

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It’s now 6:30 pm and we just changed the bandage. There was caked blood and old gel from the sutures but my dad cleaned it off with some alcohol. I put some new gauze and bandages and re-wrapped my foot. Since I was so tired after dialysis, I just crashed and didn’t call the podiatrist. I will need to do so tomorrow and schedule an appointment to remove the sutures in two weeks.

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Appointment with podiatrist set for next Friday 10/16. Hopefully the cut will have closed by then and won’t keep bleeding once the sutures are removed.