dragonlady7

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ugh so remember that post about my thumb and cellulitis

well i finished the ten-day course of antibiotics onnnnn July 27th, I’ve just counted it out now.

Yesterday, August 4th, I noticed a mosquito bite on my hand was exceptionally itchy. By the afternoon I had narrowed down that it was on the same thumb where I’d had the infected cut. By evening i was starting to suspect that it was not a mosquito bite, because the other bites I’d received that day had all calmed down and this one was only itching more.

This morning, August 5th, it is distinctly swollen, with a darker red patch at the center of the almost-blister. It is radiating pain out to the main joint of my thumb and around the back of my hand. This is not a mosquito bite. There was no reinjury. This is the infection recurring at the initial site, apropos of nothing as far as I can tell.

I am deeply unimpressed with the situation. I guess I’ll try Urgent Care. Of course I’m 300 miles away from my primary care physician.

Upsettingly, when I went to google maps and typed in Urgent Care, it was clearly displaying me paid results– only facilities from one particular company showed up, including closed sites. I was thinking of a specific one, so I scrolled manually on the map to the site where I know it was, and it showed me the neighboring businesses, so I zoomed in and zoomed in and zoomed in until finally it showed me the name of the urgent care where I’d been before– which, I might add, had a name that contained the syllables “urgent care” spelled correctly, which the company it was preferentially showing does not– and even then the name it showed me, that I had specifically zoomed in for, was not clickable and i had to go and manually type it into the search bar.

To discover that yes, that site does open today, in about an hour. So I think I’ll go there, even though they get mixed reviews and didn’t do a fantastic job on my stitches when I was there in April. (According to Google. You last visited in April. You don’t think my search algorithm should show me places I’ve visited when I search for that thing again? cough Could it be any more transparently not an algorithm for my benefit?) They did fine, and that’s all I care about really, and also if they say “this is outside our abilities” like the urgent care in Buffalo did when i showed up with the cellulitis streaking down my arm, the nearest hospital is much closer to that one than to the place Google wants me to go.

IDK I just feel like there shouldn’t be manipulation of urgent healthcare results that make you travel farther. I honestly feel like there shouldn’t be paid placement in maps at all, especially not ads that unsafely disrupt your use of a thing you’re meant to use while driving, but obviously I do not make laws. But really, hiding the closest urgent care, to which I’ve been before, from me when I searched for it is a bit much, don’t you think?

Anyway I’m throwing this into the queue and if I know anything more before it posts I’ll update– oh yes, update, the urgent care PA first wanted me to try allergy meds for a possible insect bite despite how large and swollen this was, but then i took off my watch and discovered that it is streaking down my wrist again, and she believed me then that it’s a recurrence of the infection. she prescribed me the kind of antibiotic that makes you allergic to the sun, but if it gets any worse I have to go to the ER to get a culture from it to find out what kind of critter it is that’s definitely haunting me.

Official diagnosis: Haunted Thumb (Your picture was not posted)