Stob   poker

All of a sudden I felt an excruciating pain. I looked down at my leg and blood was gushing out of a hole right above my ankle.

I thought what is going on. I was in the process of dumping a load of dead dried ornamental grass canes and all I can figure out is one of the hard canes attacked me and poked a hole in my leg.

I thought, “No big deal. I got work to do.” So I worked on for another four or more hours. Wrong thought process!

As our son Mark said, “You don’t have a lick of sense in your head!” Around dark I noticed  there was so much pain in my leg when I walked that I finally decided I had better quit.

Now to my credit I had stopped working long enough to wash the puncture out with hydrogen peroxide. This all happened around 4 o’clock Wednesday afternoon May 2.

After I finally came into the house about dark,  Jim asked me if I wanted to go to the emergency room. I said, “Let me think about it.”

So after thinking about it and since I had not had a tetanus shot, I thought maybe I had better go.

  Around 9:30 that night we headed for the ER, but the pain was so bad that I couldn’t walk into the hospital and I had to be wheeled in in a wheelchair.

Well, I did get a tetanus shot and the wound cleaned out and bandaged, but after a day of pain when I would try to walk I decided to go to the doctor again.

After all, it hurt so bad to put my leg in a vertical position that I decided crawling on the floor was a better mode of transportation. But this scared the cats. Christy ran away and wouldn’t eat her food when she saw me and Pickle got real big-eyed and slunk away—and Jim went out and got me a walker.

So Friday instead of going to Garden Club, I went to the doctor. The area around the puncture was hard, swollen, red and hot. The doctor could immediately see that the leg was infected and began the proper treatment.

It’s been a week since this happened and I still have trouble walking but it’s better. I have hobbled around even getting some of my planting done that got interrupted.

So what can I learn from this? Maybe that I needed a tetanus shot somewhere down the line since I work outside in the dirt and the manure all the time and this was the only way to knock some sense in my head to get it.

And then maybe it’s all right to slow down a little bit—only a little bit though. And most of all that God is good and is my ultimate healer through all the good doctors and other people. “But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion…”

(Psalm 86:15 KJV)      

Love in Jesus,

God’s “hobbling” servant,
Liz Ray

Written May 9, 2012