When I picked Jazz up from summer school today (remember, he has personal finance in the morning and P.E. in the afternoon – NOT the best class to have when you feel like your toes are going to fall off), and he said today was the first day that he didn’t feel the agonizing pressure on his toes that has crippled him these past several days.
Praise God! I’ve been praying really hard for God to heal him – it’s been a ROUGH week for Jazz.
He was actually walking normally to the car today. I can’t help but wonder if the Epsom salt soak helped with the pressure. We haven’t been doing the soaks because the salt has just about killed Jazz this past week, which is probably good, salt is healing, but I just couldn’t bear to see him in so much ADDITIONAL pain, so I didn’t push the issue.
Anyway, we went to the followup visit with the podiatrist this afternoon. His toes look gross, but the doctor said he’s seen much worse at this stage. He was concerned about all of the pain that Jazz has been feeling. Though his toes would still feel sensitive at this stage, he said they shouldn’t be hurting him as much as they have been and that that was a sign they were infected.
He prescribed a different antibiotic and we’ve made another followup appointment in two weeks – WHICH, hopefully, will be the last time we have to see him because HOPEFULLY, the infection will be cleared up by then and he should be feeling much better by then.
I hope.
The doctor did use some tweezers to pluck out some dead skin (string of built-up puss? I didn’t catch what that was, exactly), and Jazz nearly came unglued when he touched the tweezers to his toe. Again, the doctor said he shouldn’t have been so sensitive and that it was the infection that was causing so much pain.
I blame myself. I take total responsibility for Jazz’s pain. Why? Because I should have stuck with the initial antibiotics that the clinic prescribed. I also should have stuck with the soaks. If I had done those two things, Jazz probably wouldn’t have been in so much pain this past week.
I dropped the mom ball. I not only dropped it, it rolled under the couch and got stuck under there.
*SIGH*
The antibiotics knocked him out. They made him so drowsy that he couldn’t keep his eyes open at school, which was terrible timing because it was finals week and he sort of needed to stay awake for those. That’s why we didn’t finish the medicine. But still, I should have worked around his school schedule and given them to him, regardless. It’s my fault that this has gone on for so long.
I feel so bad for the kid. It’s bad enough to see your kid in pain, it’s worse when you realize that you actually contributed to that pain.
At any rate, we finally figured out that ibuprofen works better for him than Tylenol, so I guess that’s a plus.
A small plus.
So here we are. Taking an oral antibiotic and when the infection gets knocked out, then we’ll have to treat his toes to an anti-fungal ointment for … God only knows how long.
Jazz was actually in pretty good spirits today. I think he was just so relieved to have a break from the pressure that he was giddy. I told him on the way home today that he now had a “story” to share with people. “Remember when I was 16-years old and had to have my toenails removed? Yeah. That sucked.”
I also told him that this kind of thing, only makes a person stronger. It builds character. I know he doesn’t want to hear that from me right now, but at some point, he’ll get what I’m saying.
We ALL have stories, unfortunately.
Write From Karen 