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6:24am July 20, 2015

The one good thing about being on antibiotics…

…is the excuse to buy lots and lots of kefir… yum.

(I drink a tiny part of it and stick the other part down my j-tube, that way both my stomach and intestines get the probiotics.  And honestly any excuse to drink any amount of kefir is good enough for me.)

Also I’m cautiously optimistic about the skin infection.  It seemed to turn around significantly, yesterday afternoon – but then it got a little worse again.  There’s complicating factors too.  But at least I didn’t feel quite as much like I was watching a border war taking place on my skin, because it’s really disconcerting to watch the redness move back and forth and wonder which side is winning.  I’m still kind of nervous about it though, I’ll believe it’s over when it’s over.

Meanwhile I’m photographing it every day so that if someone asks me how it’s been doing I can just show them.  

Which reminds me, I took some really gross photos of it when the abscess was at its most leaky, which I won’t describe or post here.  But I loved the different ways my doctor and nurse responded to it:

The doctor said “Wow, uh, I’m glad I already ate lunch because that picture is disgusting.”

The nurse nonchalantly said something like “Yeah it’s pretty gross” – while finishing her lunch there in the room and clearly completely unfazed.

That illustrates a very common difference between doctors and nurses that I’ve noticed.:

Nurses have to deal with gross stuff a lot more directly and consistently than most doctors do, so they seem to build up a higher tolerance to it.  I mean, both groups of people have to deal with gross stuff, but nurses do more wound care and more direct patient care in general so their days are more saturated with it and they become really hardcore.  

I’ve even seen – and this bothers me – situations in the hospital many times over where gross things were happening and doctors were purposely shielded from having to deal with it, while nurses had to step in and take care of everything.  The doctors just left and came back later when things were less gross.  Even when the patients needed the doctors to have not just up and left like that.  And I’ve also seen situations where the doctors didn’t leave, but the nurses were left to handle the more disgusting elements of a situation nonetheless.

But doctors get paid more, go figure.

(Not that I’d begrudge my doctor anything at all, the guy is amazing, but nurses deserve more than they get, and I’ve developed an incredible respect for them.)