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Plans for holidays halted due to illness, physical pain

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Like many of our readers, I too was looking forward to finally getting some time off with the Thanksgiving holiday last week.

I enjoyed leaving early on Wednesday as our family enjoyed Thanksgiving supper a day early. This is due to me staying home on Thanksgiving with my ailing father while my wife and my kids head up to her parents home for a gathering in north Missouri.

I was looking forward to sleeping in on Thursday before taking care of my only project, that was hanging Christmas lights on my home.

Then came 4:30 a.m. when I began experiencing chills. My face felt flushed and I eventually woke up to take some Tylenol.

Fast forward five hours and those pills wore off before chills struck again. This pattern repeated a couple more times. I thought I was sick until later in the afternoon I noticed that my leg was really starting to hurt.

Come Friday morning, I still felt flushed, but had no fever. Meanwhile, I could not put any pressure to speak of on my left leg.

After attempting to take care of my father while my wife and kids were homebound, I was able to go to a local clinic.

I’m still not sure how I made it out of the car.

The diagnosis was very inflamed cellulitis.

As a big man who sits for many hours working on newspapers during the past 18 years, I’ve had maybe 5-6 other times where cellulitis affected me probably the same way it has affected many of our readers who have went through it.

Typically, a couple of furosemide (watter pill) pills later, I’m on the other side of it.

This time, however, it locked up my left calf to where it literally brought me to my floor at home multiple times. I would try just to get up only to fall back into my couch or chair as my leg locked up so hard I simply could not move.

After a few doses of antibiotic were in my system, I only received limited relief from the lower part of my leg. Well, at least it stopped putting me on the floor late Saturday afternoon. I have my left leg elevated while I’m typing this.
When I go to get up, I have to begin moving my leg several times to try avoiding the clinching of my calf while breathing in and out of my mouth a lot.

I noticed that when I held my breath in trying to get up, the pain came like a rushing wind. I will say it is extremely awkward keeping one leg elevated while attempting to type stories while working on this week’s newspaper.

This type of thing happens to a lot of our readers during the holidays.

Each of us make plans to make the best use of our time away from work.

Then we get thrown a curve ball, Perhaps it is physical pain, a family member with health issues, a car won’t start and the list goes on.

This is not the way I wanted to spend my time off, especially with the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.

I had a ruptured appendix as a teenager and that was not in the same league as the pain I’ve experienced over a few day span.

I also know that there are some readers who have experience their own battles with cellulitis.

Many have this condition on an ongoing basis and are likely uncertain just how much it will affect their health as their situation gets worse all the time. This can be serious and I’m trying to attack this head on.

Unfortunately, when there is work that has to still be done, I have no choice but to battle through my discomfort in order to get a newspaper to the press this upcoming week.

And like many others who had their holidays plans halted, I too can take off another day in the future to make it my own holiday with the hopes of getting some other projects accomplished that are on my list.