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I just learned a really hard lesson about preparing for medical emergencies. I fell way short, particularly in the area of my judgement.

A week ago Friday Mrs. L was bitten by the neighbors dog. The bites themselves were fairly minor, not even a single stitch was needed. The paramedics were called and they all agreed it was no big deal. Now this happened at about 0100 on Friday. “Go see your doctor in the morning” was the advice from the “professionals. Keep in mind I’ve got a significant pile of antibiotics on hand and you’ll see just how badly I screwed up.

By noon that day when I took her to see our physician half of her right hand was almost twice it’s normal size. Our doctor took one look at it and sent us off to the urgent care clinic for a huge shot of antibiotics and pain medications. She was really hurting. We went home, had dinner, and went to bed.

When we got up Saturday morning, the telltale signs of serious systemic infection were all present. This is less than 30 hours after the injury. Back to our family doctor we went. She took one look at it and said “Wait here. I need to make a couple of phone calls.”. Mrs L was not looking well at all at this point, with a fever of 100.5. Off to the hospital we went and she was in a room getting massive amounts of antibiotics intravenously in less than an hour.

She spent 5 full days in the hospital getting 3 GRAMS of ampicillin a day PLUS 3 milligrams of morphine every 4-5 hours “as needed”. Surgery was required to clean out the infection and as I write this she’s still recovering and is wont be able to return to work for another for another 3 days at least.

Perhaps if I’d reached into my stash when she was bitten and pushed 1000 mg of ampicillin into her things might not have gotten so bad as quickly as they did. According to the infectious disease specialist who consulted on her case another 24 hours and she would have been in life threatening trouble. All because I didn’t recognize a serious situation before it reached a critical level.

So like I said, I learned a really, really hard lesson here. All the “stuff” in the world is useless if you don’t recognize an emergency situation when its kicking you right in the balls. I came scary, scary close to losing the thing I value most in this world all due to a serious error in judgement.

She is on the mend now, but I took a well deserved blow to my ego. I thank Heaven above things turned out the way they did. I sure as hell had nothing to do with it.

Hope all is well.