Wearing a Sundress Was a Bad Idea

The blister on the inside of my right calf was the size of a small chicken egg when it first puffed up. All the skin around it was red and angry looking, and when I poked the sac-like pillowy protuberence it squished firmly, full of clear blister fluid. "That's not good," I thought, the proceeded to deal with it the way I deal with most of the cutaneous injuries that I regularly incur as a skateboarder and cyclist - I rolled down my jeans and went on my merry way. Being a child of a doctor and nurse makes you laugh at pain and non-life threatening injuries. Besides, I've found that most of my sports injuries like strained muscles, sprained joints, cuts and scrapes - the ones that aren't deep anyways - benefit most from just a few basic things: epsom salt baths, lots of sleep and being left alone. I also take care to eat better when I am healing up.

A couple of days later I noticed a screaming pain when I woke up, and a wet spot on the sheets. Are you grossed yet? This wet spot wasn't of the ordinary variety of bodily fluids you might encounter on a bed sheet, but even worse because it was from the blister on my leg which had by then swollen even more. Fearing an impending scarrage that would render future skirt wearing or shorts wearing unsightly - and make those activities an actual disservice to the world around me - I decided to finally treat my wound like the third degree burn that it was.

I had always wanted to try the moist burn pads that are in the pharmacy next to the band aids anyways. I ran to get some bacitracin and said burn pads, as well as a bunch of adhesive gauze that would let the wound breathe and not stick to it.

A few years ago I used to get injured like this all the time, mostly on my elbows and knees, the sides of my ankles and even my hips. I took a lot of thrashing in the skatebowls before I could ride them, and before I learned how to fall. Now I use my whole body to slide down the side of the wall and go limp. Or if I am not on a transition and on flat ground, I run out of the fall.

Once, an 11 year old kid collided with me going pretty fast at the skatepark and I saved us from certain doom by grabbing him under the ribs, picking him up, and running some paces until our momentum was spent. He was devastated, but I didn't feel bad that he looked like a baby in front of his friends because I had to do what I had to do.

So I carefully cleaned the blister with soapy warm water and betadine. I could kind of see under the top skin of the blister where it was slightly torn and could tell that it was a pretty bad wound. Yowza! That motorcycle exhaust pipe is probably hundreds of degrees hot. Wearing a sundress had been a bad idea. "Just think," I thought, "just beyond that are all the nerve endings and fatty tissue of my calf!" I wonder where the muscle starts?

By now my whole calf was throbbing and so I put a second skin blister pad on top of the whole mess and called it a day. For the past 10 days I've been monitoring its progess. The blister pad worked pretty well at keeping it hydrated during the crucial first few days when the white blood cells are trying to patch up the open.