...or is it a common thing to have scary mysterious medical things happen at the beginning of a weekend, when the clinic won't be open for another two days?
One time it was a slipped disc, other times it's been infections of various types...
There is a divot in my leg that was not there before.
It's on the outer side of my right calf, a couple inches above the ankle bone. It's not an area of your leg that you see often unless you shave your legs a lot. I don't; this morning is the first time in two weeks that I've shaved, because I wear pants to work and nobody sees my legs anyway. I only shave for swimming class, and we didn't have that last week, so two Saturdays ago would probably have been the last time I got a good look at it.
It's about an inch wide and a little over an inch long, and a few millimeters deep. It doesn't look like a flesh-eating virus, because there's no lesion. It has no scab, no scar. It's not red, like the temporary dents you sometimes see when you sit in a way that jabs your anklebone or something else into part of your leg. It's not discoloured at all. It looks like normal skin. It looks exactly as though a small oval divot-shaped section of flesh simply disappeared and the skin caved in over it and reattached itself. It doesn't match my left leg. It doesn't look like one of those indentations you get from adjacent, overdeveloped muscles, although I do have well-developed calf muscles from walking and swimming. I can't think of any activity I do that would cause enough repeated localised pressure to produce a dip like that. I have a belly crease from years of wearing too-tight jeans before I accepted what size I was, and I got a crease in my left thigh from constantly reaching across a low table at work, so that was one of the first things I thought of. But I can't think of anything that would cause a dent like that in that location.
I don't want to go to the emergency room for a one-inch dent. It's not bleeding, it's not discoloured, it's not suppurating, it's not changing size. I couldn't justify the expense for something that's not an apparent, immediate threat to my health. Even if it was cancer, they wouldn't see me in the ER; they'd make me an appointment with an oncologist.
But the damn thing wasn't there a fortnight ago. So is it something that spreads fast? Is it going to go away by Monday? The vast majority of things really aren't that serious, but this is a completely unknown quantity. I have no way of gauging how much of a threat it is, because I don't have the faintest idea what it could be.
So what the hell is it?
This is gonna drive me nuts all weekend.
sbt/sbc
Posted by Frida Peeple at October 30, 2004 05:15 AM