The best laid plans

My apologies go out to anyone who came to Fallcon hoping to see me there and then didn’t find me.

Hospital Room (panel from Young Justice #6)

I’d had an infected scab on my leg that started to flare up on Thursday night, the night before my birthday. Friday morning I got up and my leg was inflamed, swollen, warm, and I was in pain. So my birthday plans were scuttled in favor of medical attention. My girlfriend Hal, the builder of this website, had planned to spend my birthday with me – and she did – but it certainly didn’t end up being the day either of us had anticipated. With her chauffeuring and my pain slowly getting worse, we set off in search of medical care.

The first clinic we went to only had two doctors on duty that day and they were both overbooked, and their Urgent Care facility didn’t open until 5pm, so they referred us to a second location that had an Urgent Care that had opened earlier. At that clinic a nurse practitioner took a look at my leg and saw I was going to need IV antibiotics and said they weren’t set up to do that there, and they referred us to a third location that was could cover all our needs and said she would call ahead with the information about my case so they’d be waiting for us when we got there. As it turns out we were unclear on which of multiple entrances/check-in desks we were supposed to report to, and even after that eventually got sorted out and we found the right place, it didn’t seem like any of the information had been forwarded and it took some time to be seen.

By the time I actually got looked at, it had been more than four hours since we first started running around and my leg was noticeably more red and swollen, the pain was noticeably worse, and I was running a fever.

The short version of the rest of this story can be broken down into good news and bad news.

The good news is that after a bunch of tests they cleared me of all the scarier things we were afraid it might be indicative of. It was just a virulent staph infection, which while serious was entirely treatable with just antibiotics, along with medication for the paid and fever.

The bad news is I ended up stuck in the hospital from Friday night through mid-day Sunday, which meant that I entirely missed Fallcon. I love Fallcon, and I’d been making and extra effort to gear up for this one with a new banner, new business cards, and I had really been looking forward to promoting my new gig on Young Justice (which I’d landed by the earlier MCBA convention Springcon, but nothing had come out yet), and I was looking forward to promoting this blog!

I also had two comics industry friends in from out of town for Fallcon, Mark Stegbauer and Steve Jones, who had planned to stay at my place. I didn’t get to see as much of them as I’d have hoped for , certainly, but they were good enough to not only visit me after Fallcon on Saturday evening, but then they picked me up from the hospital on Sunday and brought me home, so I wanted to give a shout-out to them.

The biggest thanks go out to Hal who not only ran me around until  I finally got some help, but who stayed with me through all the initial testing and until I was in my hospital room for the night.

So I’m home now, I’m fine, and I’m back at work. Now I need to start planning my next convention appearance, and hopefully I’ll have better luck getting there.

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