Sunday Blog 191 – 29th June 2025
Last Sunday I finished my blog praising the health system and intoning that my spider bite wound was healing. By Friday of this week I hobbled out of the non-profit organisation I’d been discharged to for my ongoing wound care. I clutched the back of my leg on my way to my car, crying and saying to my self, “I just want to go back to Hospital in the Home.”
And there it was, the perfect patient mask I like to adopt dropped away.
Tuesday this week I was reviewed at the hospital, with the unwelcome news that I would have to undergo surgery under a general anaesthetic for the wound to be incised and cleaned out. On the plus side, I could lose the bumbag and IV antibiotics and switch to tablets.
Before the surgery I was feeling on the up and up, the pain was diminishing and I was able to drive without agony and generally get on with life. Including MC’ing a delightful evening on Tuesday with graduates of the 2025 Emerging Writers Program in Perth while they had the opportunity to read out from their work of the last year. Definitely a peak moment of the year for me.
The surgery itself on Wednesday went well, although I maintained that sense of being in the wrong play, with the wrong lines. How could a simple spider bite lead all the way to the operating theatre?
In the way of the health world, once I emerged from surgery and lost the bumbag, I was discharged from Hospital in the Home to a non-profit organisation specialising in wound care. My fingernail hold on the Hospital in the Home service was due to the IV antibiotics only. Getting wound care from them as well was a bonus. Once it was wound care only, I was shuffled out of the hospital system.
I left their care with a giant hole not unlike a bullet wound in the back of my thigh. “It has to heal from the bottom up,” I’ve been told more than once. “Otherwise it will seal over and you’ll end up having to go under the knife again.” What this means in practice is that the wound has to be packed with a ribbon gauze which is removed and replaced each day. It didn’t seem to hurt when Hospital in the Home unpacked and re-packed the wound straight after surgery but perhaps that is just my false remembering.
It bloody hurts now and it would seem there are a couple of weeks of this to come. Sigh.
When the perfect patient mask slips I can feel the feelings that I skate over so effectively with positivity. Still, I’m reminded of Anne Lamott’s prayer “I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby” I mean goodness, it’s just a spider bite, after all!