Rock Fight's Justin Housman recently cut his leg on his mountain bike pedal.
What happened next was... unexpected.
I can feel it trickling down my leg. A cool wetness that means one of the olive-sized blisters on my leg popped again. The bandage wrapped around my calf muscle will be yellow and orange and gross. The skin beneath a pock-marked war zone of glistening red.
A few days ago, this was an innocent cut I’d ignored just like you would. Like I had a thousand times before. A poke and a slice from the metal pins on the flat pedal of my mountain bike. I think, anyway. Not sure what else it would be from.
Then it started itching. A day later, the first blister formed. By the end of the day, it was joined by others. Angry little grapes of fluid clustered around the no longer innocent cut.
Uh oh.
At the hospital, the ER staff nodded knowingly when I told them I thought I’d been cut my bike pedal. At Marin General, they see plenty of mountain bike accidents. Three years earlier, in fact, nearly to the week, I was carted into that same ER in an ambulance after biffing it on a mountain bike and breaking all sorts of bones.
The same nurse who’d dug little bits of gravel from an open wound in my broken elbow back then hooked me up to an IV drip this time. Daptomyocin, a potent antibiotic. It was 1:30 am.
I watched Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune on the hospital TV until the IV machine beeped, signaling it was empty. The nurse unhooked me, and sent me on my way with a prescription for antibiotic tablets the size of fingerling potatoes.
I couldn’t help but laugh when I got home that night. Mostly because it was 2 am and I was delirious.
Soon though, I would stop laughing.
How It Started. How It's Going.
A couple days later, the entire calf of my left leg looked like it was trying to rot itself into oblivion. Shades of red I’d never seen before. Little forests of blisters erupting in new, exciting places around the periphery of the wound. Skin the feel of a grapefruit peel. A leg that looked like it had spent weeks in a WW1 trench. I went back to the ER.
This time, the doctor poked around at the unsightly mess, and immediately said I didn’t have an infection at all. I had contact dermatitis. From poison oak. What the fuck? That little cut from a mountain bike pedal had let in enough of the poison oak’s evil oil to well and truly wreck shop in my leg.
Eradicate poison oak from the face of the Earth, I say.
Now I’m on new meds. Enough steroids to propel a hall of fame baseball career. The teeth-gritting anxiety is far worse than the effects of the poison oak, to be honest. I’m drinking beer right through it, even though I’m really not supposed to, because, well, life demands it.
Is there a lesson here? A takeaway for this newsletter? Leaves of three, let it be, I guess. Also, doctors don’t always get it right.
Be safe out there friends.
Justin Housman is a journalist, podcaster, and Cicerone. You can find more of his work by following him on LinkedIn.