That is what my foot looked like a couple days ago.
Wednesday morning the joint at the base of my right big toe was red and swollen. It wasn’t nearly as painful as my first gout episode twenty years ago, but I was pretty sure that’s what it was.
Thursday, it was a lot better, and I thought maybe I had dodged a bullet. Then Saturday morning about 4 a.m. it woke me up – hurt like blazes and my whole foot was pink and swollen from the toes to the instep. I didn’t want to spend all day in the ER, so I decided to try an emergency care clinic in Atascosita.
Right after I arrived – before I checked in – the doctor took a quick look and said “Looks like gout. We can treat that.” Then they took me back to the waiting room to check in, fill out all the forms and wait. I didn’t see the doctor again for over an hour and a half.
After about an hour in the waiting room, I was taken back to an exam room where a tall stately black nurse took my vitals, etc. She was very professional, except she kept calling me “Sweetie” which felt a little odd.
When she did come into the treatment room, the doctor, a soft spoken young Latina with a heavy accent– not Mexican, more likely Caribbean like Puerto Rican or Dominican, asked me “Did you enjoy it?”
I guess I was still reacting to being called Sweetie, because I replied “Oh, yeah. I’m having a ball.”
She looked at me like I was crazy and repeated herself. “Did you injure it?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” I said, and we went on with the exam.
They took some X-rays., and I learned that even small-time emergency clinics now do digital X-rays exclusively, so they went directly to their computer.
Then I got two shots – a steroid and an antibiotic, and she wrote prescriptions for some steroid tablets and some pain pills. The injections worked so well that I never touched the pain pills; by the time I got them filled, I didn’t need them.
There was one interesting side effect. She had warned me that the steroid would make my blood sugar spike, and it did. It went up about 60 points – just enough to make me want to sleep all afternoon.
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