"He Was At Death's Door"

 I called Hatzoloh the other night. Don't get nervous, I'm fine. Last week I bumped my knee. I remember it distinctly because I was sitting at my computer desk, just as I am now, and my knee came in contact with this piece that juts out and I said some not nice things to the desk. I can't write them here because this is a family blog. Anyway, since I'm on Coumadin (rat poison...remember?), whenever I bang myself I get a black and blue mark almost immediately. Not this time. There was a bump and it continued to hurt for days later, but no mark. Then something weird happened: I developed this strange looking mark further down my leg, right at the bottom of my shin. It was totally asymmetrical. It looked a little like a map of Illinois, and a little like Wille Nelson. It was red and angry looking, and it hurt a little, too. For some strange reason, I thought it might be cellulitis. Now, I had never had cellulitis, unless you count the time I was in Israel and got a nasty scratch on my leg and went to the hospital just to be safe and the guy there said, "yesh lechah cellulitis" ("you have celluitis"). But I don't think he knew what he was talking about. I decided to go to Dr. Katzenelenbogen to have it checked out. He looked at it and wasn't sure what it was, so he sent me for an x-ray. I found that odd; why x-ray a skin blotch? He wanted to see if there was any bone damage where the bump was. Next day I happened to have an appointment with Dr. DePalo. I showed him my leg and he said immediately, "you have cellulitis." He also took the opportunity to let me know what he thought of Dr. Katzenelenbogen, albeit subtly. Anyway, see how smart I am? And I've never even stepped foot into medical school! He prescribed Keflex, a heavy duty antibiotic and told me to start on it immediately. Apparently this was nothing to sneeze at. Good thing, too, because it's hard to sneeze at the bottom of your shin. I tried. Well, the next day I had a bunch of errands in Manhattan and I was running around all day. When I got home I noticed that my foot had swelled up significantly. I wasn't sure if it was from fluid (edemda) or new blood that was pooling around my ankle, which would mean that I was still bleeding. I called Hatzoloh and asked them to send some guys, but no ambulance and no sirens, please; I had just moved into my new place and did not want to cause a scene at two in the morning. The two EMT's who showed up assured me that the swelling was indeed just fluid, not blood. They were going to leave, but they needed authorization first. When they wind up not taking someone to the hospital, it's called R.M.A., or "Refused Medical Attention". There was a time when they could do this on their own, but apparently someone had died a while back, so now they had to check in with a supervisor first. At 2:30 the guy they happened to get on the phone was Yisroel Brody, one of the guys who had transported me to the hospital months ago during one of my many "bumps in the road". They told him who I was. I heard his reply through the cell phone: "yeah, I know the case...the guy was at death's door". And that, my cyber-friends, was the whole point of this post. Yeah, he said, the guy was at death's door. I've heard it many times before, but every time I hear it again, it creeps me out and I get into my "gotta be a better person and gotta make better use of my life" mode. That's not a bad thing. So thanks, Yisroel Brody, for another wake-up call.

It definitely couldn't hurt.

PS Willie is fading away, thank G-d, and the x-ray actually did show something funky about my bone (a break in the bone "envelope" or some such thing)...way to go, Dr. K.!