HW27- Visiting an Unwell Person

My visit to an "unwell person" was more of their visit to me. I am talking about my brother of course, a drummer who bangs on cans with conviction. However, he hasn't played drums for some weeks now, after he stepped on a toothpick, lodging it up the ball of his foot! At the time, he was up in his dorm room in Boston, hours away from us. After the fateful step, he attempted to pull out said toothpick. Unfortunately, while he got about half of it out, the other half snapped off inside his foot, making it virtually unreachable to bare hands. A friend of his escorted him to the Mass General (very good hospital btw) emergency room (keep in mind this was about 3 weeks before my own predicament in the ER) to have the toothpick removed. To him, this situation was painful and extremely unpleasant, yet at the same time hilarious (think of the sheer physics!!).

No doctor at Mass General could successfully remove the toothpick. They told him they could cut further, but they risk serious nerve damage. He told them not to (wouldn't want serious nerve damage to the foot of a drummer!), and they let him go with bandages, crutches, and most delicious of all, powerful antibiotics. This tasty combination made his life very unpleasant for some time, and after a short while he could no longer take the antibiotics. The doctors told him that there was simply nothing they could do about the toothpick, and because he seemed to avoid infection, was free to keep it encased in his foot (provided it didn't cause unnecessary pain and problems)

Well what do you know! Weeks later he could still feel the pain in his foot (so much that he could not so much as brush his foot on any surface), and this puzzled the doctors greatly. To fast-forward this for you, many tests were conducted and the riddle still has not been solved. Some specialists point to RSD, a nervous system disorder known to cause chronic burning of the affected nerve area. For privacy reasons I'm not going to go further than that, but if you don't know about RSD, look it up, and you will find that it is nothing to sneeze at. Other people have said that while he shows the signs of RSD, he is more likely to have the "psuedo" RSD, a fool's gold version of the real thing. As of this date (1/1/11) and countless tests, it is still unknown what that little piece of wood has done.

This has been a crushing blow to him. For someone who is extremely active, beyond the drum kit to the tennis courts and ping pong tables and swimming pools etc., to even think about the possibility of never having full use of you foot is astronomically depressing. Keep in mind that he went through almost everything I did with my father, even moreso being that he was my brother's best friend and closest companion. Right about now he feels pretty fed up with doctors, hospitals, and just about everything that has to do with illness and dying. He finds it particularly frustrating that so many well-educated specialists cannot solve a mystery solely caused by a tiny, obscure toothpick, and that this same small splinter of wood can single-handedly handicap him for the rest of his life. It is extremely upsetting to him and everyone around him that the medical system has yet again continued to fail our family (in addition to the fact that they couldn't even identify MY problem when I went to the ER a short time ago). Obviously my mom (the guest speaker) applies to the situation and continues to be my brother's best advocate, in a situation that is grimly familiar to that of my father's.

As for my brother's current attitude, he continues to be positive and fight with determination to beat whatever might be lurking against him. He has been making good progress in rehabilitating his footwork and continues to write some kickass music in the meantime! He knows his father would fight to the end against his enemy, and in those spirits he seems to be doing well!