Oh What a Night

I am in Atlanta doing the Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining show.

Yesterday was setup and meant a lot of trips to and from the truck to unload for the exhibit.

This normally would not have been an issue but Monday morning I was coming down with an attack of gout, only my third ever and the first in many years. Red wine cause me to gt gout so after I discovered that I have sworn off of that forever. Don't know what brought this on. Meat, alcohol, and legumes (of which peanuts are) can all be culprits but for me the only causal agent ever was red wine.

I called Affinity to talk to Sheila who is my doctor's nurse. She told me they were backed up and put me through to a triage nurse. Got voice mail. Oh for the days when you could talk to your doctor who knew what made you tick. At 3:10 that afternoon I called back because I thought that had been enough time for me to be taken care of. Another triage nurse and she told me they had closed the clinic because of bad weather. Hmm I was working.

I had to go to Dothan for a meeting the next morning and go there met and then before lunch which was 1:06 in Georgia I called again. She told me my doctor had left for the day and she couldn't help me but perhaps if i could be to the walk in clinic by 1:30 they could see me before the end of the day. I was in Dothan and even the SST could not have gotten me to Tifton that quickly. That night it was getting bad enough I had to have some relief and another doctor friend called me in a prescription for some medicine that dissolves the uric acid in the joint and gets you better.

I started on that prescription right away but had a by then full blown case of the gout.

Hence the trips to the truck really hurt more and more as I went.

I went back to my room and soaked my, now twice its normal size, right bunion in hot epsom salt water. Then I put an icepack on my foot. Did I mention my trip hobbling around Walgreens?

I washed and trimmed the chicken, boiled and peeled eggs, cleaned and trimmed the celery for the next day in my kitchen in the room. At 11 I went to bed after another soak and icing. At 12:38 this morning I was hurting so bad I got up and took a shower and dressed and called the front desk to find an emergency room.

He sent me on a mystery trip because one road he told me to turn on as I can tell does not exist. Did I mention he had a funny accent from a foreign land?

I stopped at a 24 hr CVS and no one there could tell me where I was supposed to be going and I showed them the directions I had carefully written and read back to the night clerk at the hotel.

I pulled out of the parking lot of CVS which had a pharmacist who sounded a lot like the night clerk at the hotel and was going to back track to see if I had done something wrong. About 200 yards from the CVS a nice police officer pulled me over for driving without lights at sometime about 2 in the morning.

I told him it was an odd way to finally find someone who could give me directions and explained my situation. He told me the hotel had not sent me to the closest ER and told me that it was on South Cobb which was the other way on the road I was traveling.and then take a left and it would be a mile and a half on the left. I asked him if he was going to write me a ticket at that time of the night for making a U-turn and he told me only if I got hit doing so. U uied right in front of the nice officer and his directions were perfect.

At the ER it took a bit of time but they finally got all my paperwork done and I spent much of the time talking to a black lady who was from Queens originally and her mother still lives in Long Island. We talked about the city and she told me it was evident I knew my way around New York City. It passed the time and they called me back and the doctor walked in and immediately diagnosed my foot with a really bad case of the gout. He told me from now on when I had felt the onset I needed to call my family doctor. I spared him the drama of the story.

He gave me a steroid shot and an anti-inflammatory shot...actually it was a nurse who did that. And, two hydrocodone pain pills to take when I got back to my room. Now I don't know what those shots were exactly but I can tell you this...the pain was already easing and the swelling going down by the time I went back by the CVS to get the three prescriptions he had given me filled and got to my hotel. I took the two pain pills and got in bed at 4:30 to arise again at 6:45 to get to the show. If I was rich I would have paid a million dollars a piece for those two shots.

I did the show today virtually pain free and that was on my feet all day long.

I think I will go to bed when I get my shower and catch up on my sleep before the show opens tomorrow.