Pyoderma Gangrinosum, MRSA & other nice things to spell

My ulcer {No, I am NOT a diabetic} has grown from a scratch in the infected area which was ONLY between the top and bottom screw scars. The scratch came from tripping over a filled hand basket at a Wal-Mart during the Christmas rush in 2005. Wal-Mart took a chance on me and gave me a job as a temporary cashier for the 2005 Christmas season. {I've done so well and gotten so many raises in the past two years that I've had to cut back my hours in order to comply with my disability regulations AND because the pain from the leg wouldn't allow me to stand for significant periods of time. When was the last time you saw an associate SITTING in a Wal-Mart?}

A customer got disgruntled with the line & decided that the BEST place to leave her overfilled hand basket would be DIRECTLY behind where I stood at a cash register ringing up other people in line. As a result, when I turned to go & have a check approved at the Central Podium as per policy at that time; I completely tripped over the basket, scratching & bruising my leg and fell down.

The growth of the wound came from Florida doctors who couldn't resist trying to debride or clean the wound; completely disregarding the pyoderma gangrinosum diganosis for their own "expert" opinions. Some of those expert opinions had me ending up in a very expensive trauma and wound care hospital with a suspected case of MRSA in 2006 which never materialized { I have a higher normal level of staph as in my body, more on that in another post} and then cost me over 13 weeks of work doing mandated bedrest; without any change to the wound at all - good or bad. All in all, each "EXPERT"{ read licensed} doctor who told me he was a specialist at these types of wounds; to which I had been referred, did the SAME TESTS, got the SAME results and tried to use the SAME FIVE antibiotics to which I was allergic; {Ciproflaxin, Levoflaxin, Pennicillin D, Vanocmyacin, and Zyvox-which also costs between $60-$100 per caplet!} and when those and other products that had ingredients to which I was senstive & had been demanded to use anyway; failed to produce ANY healing effect; Or in FACT made the wound WORSE: they would throw up their hands, tell me that it was ONLY the practice of medicine and that they couldn't be right all of the time, and then they would refer me. AFTER of course, charging my insurances from $3,000 to $19,000 EACH in some cases. Not all the drugs could be gotten through the pharmacopea at the VA and insurance didn't cover all of the outside prescriptions either.

Several doctors in Central Florida charged me for wound care when I was the one doing the bandage changing. They also sold me through their medical supplies company without letting me know that medicare doesn't cover bandaging medical supplies; so the out of pocket expenses became completely my own; I'm STILL paying for 2006's medical supplies on a monthly basis direct to the supplies company. Medicare and I are now going through all of the old bills to see if there are double charges for other services that weren't preformed by each office.

Something Strange that I saw:

The Mayo Clinic doctors always came in in a group like they were connected at the waist like those plastic beads you get as a child or like that Monty Python skit with the group of Arabs who come, pick up an inanimate object and carry it away yelling yaaddayaaddayaddda as they enter and leave the scene. It was rare that the female doctor who was my referral doctor was able to either suggest or treat me by herself without coming in with a whole gaggle of male doctors practically attached to her. The only thing that they could say over and over again was that I HAD TO GO TO THE MAYO CLINIC IN MINNESOTA or to the Cedars Medical Center in Miami to be seen as they didn't know how to treat me in Jacksonville and didn't have the facilities to do so. That didn't make sense, they have St. Luke's hospital right there in northern Jacksonville; but no, they refused to do any treatment to me other than the first disasterous soap & biopsy that enlarged my wound, practically doubling its size in less than 3 months. It was like listening to a cloned voice, as if they had been programmed to say that in response to certain medical stimulus like a problem that they hadn't addressed before.

In the three months of appointments and the month that I had to wait as a new patient FOR an appointment; the doctors at The Mayo Clinic wouldn't / didn't do any tests, wouldn't do any treatment past offering a soap that I was allergic to AND doing a double biopsy even though I had test results with me, biopsies that ended up jumping the wound boundaries over 6 centimeters in diameter before it was all over. It was like the Stepford Doctors. Really WEIRD. And every doctor that saw me? The appointments ran to the $1,500 mark with a la carte stuff for things like bandaging {which I did, they wouldn't even come back into the room after making their group pronouncements each month}...