Sometime around the end of May, I got bitten in the small of my back by an insect. I didn't think anything of it of course, since I do get bitten all the time. Insects seem to like my blood or something. However, this bite was different. Instead of going away after a while, it got infected and the area around it start to swell painfully.
In retrospect, I may have scratched it after touching a mildly infected pimple I had near my nose. Now I'm deathly afraid to scratch anything on my body. I tried to treat it myself, with cold compresses, then hot compresses.
I put ointment on it and disinfected it. But it didn't get better. It eventually become so painful that I had to resort to painkillers, which worked halfway, but I was still in a lot of pain. But the swelling spread and became worse, and I was running a low fever, so 3 weeks ago I finally gave up and had The Guy take me to see a doctor. The doctor took one look at it, tried to lance it a bit without any painkiller - it hurt so much I screamed and then told me that I had to go to hospital emergency in Carpentras a town that's the regional center of this area, about a 20 minute drive from our village right away.
After several hours of waiting around and a couple of tests, the surgeon who examined me told me that I'd have to stay overnight, and have surgery the next day. And so began my totally unplanned stay in a French hospital.
I've had three surgeries, to remove quite a lot of infected tissue. They told me that they had to cut away about a 20 cm 7 inch square and 2 cm 1 inch deep bit of tissue, since the infection had burrowed quite deep. Also, they suspect I may have the early symptoms of diabetes, since my blood sugar level is elevated though it may be at least partly due to the infection; the numbers have come down quite a bit in the last few days.
