This is the "help Candy decide whether to insist on being checked into a hospital" forum.....

I had elbow surgery Nov. 11. In a cast for a bit, sling, brace, blah blah blah. Staples came out this past Wednesday. Scar's kind of scary-looking (I didn't expect it to be that big!), but just fine, everything healed up well, no infections or anything.

This week Tuesday, on the way from a different doctor appointment that friends had taken me to, I scraped my leg against the car door while I was trying to get my big butt out of the back seat. Longish scrape, certainly not worthy of stitches or anything, didn't bleed, hurt a bit more than it should have, perhaps, but I didn't think anything of it.

That was Tuesday. It hurt more and more Wednesday. By the time I got home from therapy at 5 pm, I could barely put pressure on it. The staples had just come out and I was SO excited to be able to get to take my very first long, hot bath since the surgery.

So I got undressed, and I looked down at my leg, and it was the size of a watermelon, with about a 12-inch diameter (seriously) flaming red, swollen, hot, tender area around it.

Hellooooooooooooooooooooo, emergency room.

I had first called a friend who's a nurse to describe it to him. He told me to hang up and drive to the ER, so I did. I had pulled up my pants leg to describe it to him, so just left it rolled up. I walked into the ER, they asked me what I needed to be seen for, I pointed, and they finished my registration in record time and got me to a room ASAP.

From this one lousy little scrape (and it wasn't even a rusty car door), I have gotten myself cellulitis. I will spare you all the gory details, 'cause it was pretty darn gory, what they did to me to clean it out, etc.

My pdoc, who I saw Tuesday morning, ordered some labwork, because for the second month in a row I told him I could NOT get out of bed, was sleeping all the time, etc, but my mood has been fine, not depressed at all. His office is in the hospital's outpatient building, which is acrosss the street from the hospital, so after leaving his office I went over there and got the labwork done, then went home.

He called me Tuesday afternoon and said he was very concerned by some of the results and to get into my regular dr. ASAP, and when I called my regular guy to make the appointment, I found out my pdoc had already made me one!

Regular Boy looks at test results, says "you're anemic and you have low thyroid." Yay. My white blood cell count also was pretty low, which apparently is an odd thing.

OK. Now that I have completely confused you by going through all this back and forth , here is my question:

Both my ears are infected. I have sores on my tongue that are making it very difficult to eat. My leg is SERIOUSLY infected. This all happened this week. Does this have any correlation to my arm surgery/getting the staples out, and should I just take what they gave me for antibiotics, or insist that I clearly have something systemic going on and need IV antibiotics instead? It just seems like too much coincidence at one time. (My arm scar is still just fine, BTW.)

Thanks for any help......I don't usually have this many health problems in a YEAR, much less a week, and I'm not having much fun with it! Blah.

Candy