MiddleFingerMom had a SERIOUS complication following this last hospital stay.

[MiddleFingerMom]

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[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. lord knows I am allergic to the staff where I work

[hunter]

2. My favorite hospital visit ever...

... I woke up one morning and I had these itchy red dots all over me, sort of like chicken pox, measles, or rubella, maybe even hives, but the dots were much smaller.

On my own I might have waited to see if it got worse, but my wife told me to go the the local teaching hospital's urgent care / emergency room.

There a triage nurse took me to an exam room, asked me to take off all my clothes and sit on the table in a hospital gown.

The first doctor came in and said "Wow, can I take a picture of this?"

I said "sure" and he did, taking a few pictures with some kind of Polaroid close-up camera.

Then he came back and asked if his colleagues could look at me. I agreed, and a bunch of people came in to look at me, all nodding their heads and looking very wise and thoughtful.

Then they all left and the doctor came back, put on gloves, and took some kind of sample, a scraping from the skin on my chest.

He left and I sat there alone maybe fifteen minutes wondering what sort of exotic disease I had. At last the doctor came back and said it was probably some kind of virus and I should come back if it got worse.

It didn't get worse so I never went back.

I still sometimes wonder what that was all about or if there are pictures of me in some medical journal.

[MiddleFingerMom]

3. When I was in the Army, my elbow swelled up about half-again its normal size...

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... was very very tender and CHERRY-red. The doctor I worked with thought it was secondary syphilis(!!!!!)
and sent me to the hospital. The doctor who checked me out asked me a coupla questions and then took me
in to the young doctors waiting for him to take them on rounds.
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Turns out during the week prior, I had been ironing my uniform and extremely briefly touched the iron to
the skin of my right wrist -- just enough to redden it a little bit, but also enough to introduce a bacteria which
moved up to my next nearest joint.
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He told the young doctors that the misdiagnosis was what occurs when you look for the exotic without ruling
out the common and much more frequent first.
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PHEW!!!!
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,
,

[hunter]

4. Yikes! That's scary.

With today's antibiotic resistant bacteria they'd probably have knocked you down and installed a central line stat.

[ohiosmith]

5. Penicellin cleared up my staff infection!

[MiddleFingerMom]

6. My doctor obviously though penis illin' was the reason I needed penicillin.

[ohiosmith]

7. Dude!