Huh, it didn't LOOK infected!

But it sure felt infected
October 29, 2009

I came to the hospital yesterday because I was dissolving into a screaming mess. (What's the problem, Tucker? Isn't that your natural state?) Hey, who's doing the talking here? Much as I was confident I had not torn my ACL when I had that incident in Seattle due to everyone telling me my knee felt secure, I was confident that my knee was not infected Tom Brady style because my physical therapist said it wasn't red and pussing so it wasn't infected. But something was clearly amiss, because it was getting more and more swollen and hot and stiff, and I was crawling around my house scared to stand up cause it hurt to, and generally behaving strangely. So I call my doctor all panicked-style, and they say come in, we'll see you today, and so I blow off work to do that.

They aspirate (that's a big doctor word, I bet Pooja and A-Tong and Cara know what it means. It means "drain") some fluid from my knee, and since I've had this done once before I am surprised by the color: yellow. Last time it was red and clear (anyone around for the Copehagen balloon knee? TT was.), but then again, last time it was infected, so maybe yellow is good? The doctor is surprised, too, and that's never good, although he seems to be concerned not by the yellow color so much as the viscocity.

He wastes no time. I'm like -- second opinion? and my words echo as he simultaneously: sends knee fluid to the lab, sends me with a lab request sheet marked STAT to get blood work and all that jazz, and admittance paperwork done in remote reaches of the hospital. I got a wheelchair, and Joe along with an amazing nurse named Janet from Jamaica, who sent her peeps from other floors to look after me as I made my way through the system, treated me royally. I heard my name echoing across intercoms as departments awaited my arrival. Man I felt like a VIP.

I'd arrived at the doctor's office around 2 pm; by 6 pm I was experiencing deja vu (even had the same admitting nurse from a month ago) as I got wheeled into the fucking operating room. Doc re-opens my knee at the incision sites and flushes it with water. It's cloudy in there, he says, but everything's intact. In other words, the infection didn't eat the ACL graft, which is the worst case scenario.

Stayed the night, now they have to flush it again today at 6 pm. If it looks clearer in there, then they send me home Friday morning, and for the next 6 weeks I'll have an IV stub in my arm (or leg? Not sure) and a nurse will come to my house and teach me how to hook myself up to an antibiotic drip (they're all: it'll be very discreet. No one will know you have an IV. I'm like, I want EVERYONE to know!), then they come every week to give me a new bag. Right now, they're trying to "grow a bug" out of the fluids they took out of my knee so they know what the bacteria is, and what antibiotic to use.

I'm going into surgery at 6 pm and should be out of here first thing Friday morning, and my weirdo family members keep marching in here, so thank you for wanting to visit me but I'm not even going to tell you where I am. Get to the point, Tucker! How will this affect your recovery? Will you be ready to play next season? I refer you back to Tom Brady. He was back a season later (and his surgery was more serious), and he's four and two at the moment. Yes, it will delay things a bit, but I feel like a thousand times better than I did yesterday.

And I leave you with a funny anecdote... When I came in yesterday, my blood pressure was high because I was running a fever and whatnot. As I slept here at the hospital last night, post-operatively (so the infection had been mostly flushed) around 5 am a nurse snuck in and stuck a thermometer thing in my ear and a blood pressure sleeve on my arm. A few minutes later, another nurse runs in with a bag of IV fluid, wakes me, asks: can i see the ceiling? Am I dizzy? She basically thinks I'm dying.

I'm like, yeah lady, I'm fine! I was just sleeping nicely. Can you let me return to that? But no, now it's other nurses, doctors -- who finally cause my blood pressure to rise enough to satisfy them that I am not drifting into the afterlife. Then just a little bit ago (after repeated readings all day), a doc comes in and says, are you a runner or something? I'm like -- close enough, yeah, sure. He's like, okay, then we won't worry about the low blood pressure anymore. Cool.