Dealing with MRSA

The next morning I woke up to discover that the infection had spread to my face.  I had a huge lump on my neck, and my upper lip was incredibly swollen.  I went straight to the doctor’s office.  Kaiser has a policy about not usually making same day appointments, but I just walked up to my doctor’s section of the hospital, went up to the registration window, and said: “I don’t have an appointment, but the doctor took me off my medication yesterday, and I woke up looking like this!”  “Oh!  The doctor will see you; just give us a few minutes.”  I paid the regular $110, and I soon found myself waiting in an examination room.  After a few minutes the doctor walked in.  He just stood there looking at me for about fifteen seconds, then said “Well, that was a bad judgment call,” and then turned around and left.  I sat there waiting another fifteen minutes before he returned.  “I’ve been up on the fourth floor talking with the Head Neck and Throat department, and they are going to see you right away to take care of that.  And then we have a new medication for you to try out.

 

So I went up there, registered and paid again, and was taken in for what I guess is called outpatient surgery.  After my experience in the Navy infirmary, I was a bit apprehensive about what was coming next.  But they gave me some localized anesthetic, and I hardly felt what they were doing.  They slit my lip open, drained the wound, and cleaned up the infection.  They didn’t do much with my neck, although they did examine it a little bit.  When I left, I expected to look like Frankenstein, but when I stopped in the bathroom, I was surprised that you could hardly see any evidence of what my lip had looked like an hour before.

 

I went down to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription, and was pretty surprised at how much it was going to cost.  The amount they wanted was more than my annual deductible, regardless of the fact that I had spent quite a bit of money at the hospital the last few weeks, and even twice earlier that morning.  They acknowledged that it was clearly a mistake, but that I would be refunded the difference once the paperwork was processed.  This ended up taking over six months, and they over-refunded me, leading to months more phone calls and frustration, to get it balanced out.  The new drug they gave me was Zyvox, and the bottle said it was Batch #002.  I started taking it immediately, and by the next day, it had totally killed the infection.  I still had to cut the dead material out of my neck on my own.  But things improved dramatically from that point forward, and I finished out the prescription.