Who knew a bump on the back of a leg could lead to a couple days in the hospital?

Yes, something as simple as a bump the size of a bug bite made my stay at the hospital not very delightful. When I was in fifth grade I got this illness called a staph infection. No one knew how I got it the doctors said it could be from a bug bite that had the illness, from a cut I could’ve had on the back of my leg and then it got in my cut. They even said I could’ve gotten it from the kneepads I wore when I played volleyball. I woke up one morning and found this little bump on the back of my leg. As the day went on I noticed it started to hurt and someone had told me it turned black. So I went to the doctors to see what was wrong with me, and they drew a target on the back of my leg, and said if the redness spread outside the target then my parents would need to take me to the hospital.

That night when I got home my mom said she wanted to check my leg to see if the bump had gotten bigger. It had. It was pretty big, and swollen and the redness was a huge circle around the bump. I think this scared my mom more than me. She didn’t show any fear on her face, but I could see from the fear in her eyes something was not right. So we got packed up in the car and went to the hospital where we waited in the emergency room forever. I had a fever, but I was freezing and I wasn’t feeling too great, but who really does while in the emergency room?

Finally they called us back into a room at around 1:00 a.m. and told me I was going to get an IV, and I had no idea what they were talking about. So the nurse explained to me what an IV was, and what it does, and why its used, but the only words I heard were ‘needle in your arm’. This freaked me out more than anything; I was so scared. But my mom told me it was going to be ok and that I would be fine. The nurse put the IV in me and, man was I screaming and crying like you wouldn’t believe. It hurt so bad as the cold tip of the needle pricked and then pierced my skin.

When the nurse left I remember asking my mom if I had to go to school in the morning and she no and that she would even pay me $20 for being so brave. I didn’t think screaming and crying was being brave but I didn’t object because, hey, I was getting $20. The nurse came back in and we then moved to a different room where I had my own tv and a bunch of people examined me. Throughout the days I was there and throughout all the examining they found out it was a staph infection. They told us that I would have to havesurgeryy in order to get this infection out of me. Today I know that if the staph infection isn’t found soon enough it can kill a person and it is highly contagious.

While I was being examined my family came and visited me a lot and that was fun because they would hang out with me and play with me and do other fun activities with with me. But my parents were the only ones who stayed there with me 24/7 and that is how I heard about how I yelled at the nurses in my sleep when they came in to examine me. That’s right, I said yell. When the nurses would do the little blood pressure strap around my arm I would sleep talk, or scream at them to get out of the room. My mom even said one time one of the nurses jumped when I shouted at her. I can definitely see why nurses didn’t want to take care of me at night, I wasn’t the best patient during the night.

Finally after two and a half days in the hospital, and days away from school, and days of constant examination, even though it felt like I had been there for a month especially with not much sleep. It was time for me to havesurgeryy. This scared me because I didn’t know how I was going to turn out or what kind of pain I would be in after thesurgeryy. They gave me some kind of medicine that would make me fall asleep so I wouldn’t be conscious during thesurgeryy. When I woke up I had stiches in my leg where the bump had once been. About hourrs later, they took the stiches out and there was a big hole in my leg. That part scared me, I mean there is this hole in my leg and I thought that it would be easier for another infection to contaminate me. The doctors had to clean out the wound with peroxide and it stung so badly I started to squirm, so the nurse had to hold my leg down. I had to stay one night after that, just to make sure everything was ok. By the time I left that day my fever had gone down and I was all-better except for this hole in my leg that I had to clean twice a day and keep bandaged.

That stay at the hospital for me was very scary because it was many firsts for me. It was the first time I remember being in a hospital, it was the first time I had an IV, and it was the first time I had been in the hospital for a long period of time. Today I still recall the painful memories, and I have a scar on the back of my leg from thesurgeryy. I wanted more to know about how to be careful with cleaning cuts so they don’t end up like me, because trust me it is a very scary and painful situation, and that’s why I wrote this paper.