Heh. In our institution, the patients often dislike being put on “MRSA precautions” so seldom raise the topic. Something we’re trying to overcome…
purple haze, by what you posted, it sounds like your doc has things well in hand. Don’t worry. And I don’t swab most MRSA patients’ noses either, unless there are more problems present than most folks have.
I had something like that on my chest a while back. It would swell up then go down then swell up bigger and hurt like hell. I tried popping it like a zit a few times (it was more like several tiny zits all clustered together) but it would keep coming back. My doctor squeezed it, swabbed it and sent the sample off to a lab where they said it was “an exotic bug bite”. He gave me some penicilin and sent me on my way.
Didn’t work, it kept coming back, sometimes angrier than others. Finally I made another appointment, only with the RN instead of the Doc. She looked at it, squeezed it, then stuck a syringe in it pretty deep and drew out about an ounce of some nasty stinky green and black crap. She packed up the crater on my chest, gave me a script for some sulfa based antibiotic and suggested I eat some yogurt with it or it would give me the runs.
The spot went down and eventually went away but there is still a small lump there (that I hope is scar tissue and not sleeping green crud). I was never diagnosed with MRSA but, if that’s anything close to what it’s like I don’t think I ever want to be.
nd_n8 exemplifies the essential medical principle of aggressive wound drainage. Pus must flow before the lesion will go!!!
I first noticed the bump Sunday afternoon. I was changing clothes and when I took off my jeans, something hurt on my leg about six inches above my knee. When I looked at it it resembed a mosquito bite, only about three times bigger than usual. it was red and slightly raised. It didn’t itch at all, but was slightly painful to the touch.
Monday it was bigger and had a deep pink color encircling the bump. The bump wasn’t as raised, but was starting to spread just slightly. It looked like no bug bite I’ve ever seen. When the center turned a very deep reddish purple and the dark pink surrounding it spread even more, I went to the doctor.
I’ve only taken two doses of the antibiotic so far and am watching to see if it keeps getting bigger, or starts to subside. So far it is getting bigger. I’m hoping that it stops doing so today. The area is eminating a lot of heat; I’m guessing that’s the infection at work.
It hurts when clothing comes into contact with it. That’s actually better then when it was first spreading; it felt like someone was poking a needle into the area. Not all of the time, but many times during the day I would be startled by what felt like a needle poke. It wasn’t horribly painful or anything because it never lasted longer than 30 seconds or so.
The doctor drew a circle around it with a pen and told me that if the infection got over the line, to seek additional medical attention. Right now it is right on the edge; maybe just a hair over in one spot. I’m keeping an eye on that now.
If I had a nickel for every swab sent to the lab for rapid MRSA PCR testing, I could probably do a Scrooge McDuck backstroke through all my shiny change.
Not all that many positives, thank goodness. We test patients on their way in and out of either ICU or CCU, to track and try to prevent hospital-acquired infections. We also test all of the patients coming in for surgery (we do a lot of joint/spine stuff) so the doc can get them on antibiotics before their surgery, if necessary.
Perhaps I’m out of my depth here but if they didn’t take a sample from the wound and test it for MRSA then this could just be every day ordinary staph infection which is different from MRSA because its not resistant to antibiotics.
What you may have there is a boil. I speak from experience I’ve had a boil and a carbuncle ( a collection of boils that run together). Both in the same arm pit and within 4 weeks of each other.
The carbuncle was first and was extremely painful at the end I couldn’t even let my arm hang at my side. MD lanced it, drained it and sent some puss off to the lab. Just Staph no MRSA. Bactrim and a band aide were the only treatment. A boil in the same place developed about two weeks after I thought I was healed. It popped and drained on it’s own. Anther 10 day course of Bactrim and I’ve been fine for over a year.
Nothing like having your doctor diagnose you with something that sounds like it’s from the 18th century
If your wound isn’t markedly better within 2 days of taking the Bactrim I would definitely get seen again. As Qadgop says, if there is an abscess in there that wasn’t drained, the antibiotics aren’t going to make it go away. Also, what dose of Bactrim are you on?
At the hospital I was at previously, they required us to culture every abscess we drained. It takes 2 days minimum for a culture result and it’s very labor intensive. We were sending 3-4 swabs per day (and this was a small ER). Something like 95% were coming back CA-MRSA. It got to the point where they were going to have to hire more lab staff. We finally convinced them to drop the requirement (really we just stopped sending them). If there’s any doubt, I’ll send a swab. But Bactrim is cheap and it will kill regular staph just as well as MRSA.
Question - I had it out with my college Health Center over a eczema rash that I was convinced was secondarily infected because my eczema never itches unless it is infected with something. “Eczema itches” they would say, and send me away. Finally I refused to leave until they swabbed the 2 in x 2in oozing rash on my palm.
Turns out it was “-myacin resistant staph.” Is that something different from MRSA? They sent me home with Cipro (I’m allergic to penicillin) which cleared it all up just fine.
I have always wondered this: is there something about a person that makes it more/less likely they will get boils (with MRSA or not)?
This exchange reminds me of a “Wizard of Id” comic I read some years ago, but it still sticks with me to this day.
Sir Rodney is conversing with the Wizard:
Rodney: Can you remove curses?
Wizard: Yeah, but you’ll have to pay through the nose.
Rodney: Do you take nickels?*
*If you’ve never read this strip, Sir Rodney is a knight with an unusually protruding nose. It also may help you get it if you’re familiar with the expression “May you be cursed with a nose full of nickels.”
The bottle says that the dose is DS 800-160. I’ve no idea what that means but maybe some of you will.
Now for some reason my palms itch and I’m really really tired. I woke up at 7:30 and fell back asleep until just now; that’s definitely not like me. My appetite is nonexistant too, also not like me. 
So, in a few days maybe I’ll be thin and well-rested.
Oh! By the way, I’m a woman, not a guy.
If I had a nose full of nickles,
I’d sneeze all my nickles, atchoo.
Tell me about this. They colonize in the nose and then show up in other parts of the body? Can you kill them off if youhave them in your nose? Can you get the kind of infection in your nose that will put you in the hospital? Is that what a sinus infection actually is? Can it harm your brain?
Great. My boyfriend has this thing on his shoulder since he got back from North Carolina. It’s red and I figured it was a spider bite because it looks like that “two fang” pattern, but now I’m concerned. The skin around it seems like it’s peeled or something. He won’t go to the doctor, though, unless it’s definitely screwed up, because he’s uninsured.
I thought I noticed the two fang marks thing too, but it was hard to tell. As it turns out, that wasn’t fang marks, but rather the pores starting to get inflamed. Now there are five inflamed bumps, instead of the original two.
Last spring I awoke one morning to find (on my belly) a round black black circle-ish sore surrounded by reddish skin. I knew it was new, since I had just been reviewing the rather bad scars on my belly two day prior.
I did an internet search for skin cancer and it looked all the world to me like the pictures on the net.
I asked a friend to compare and he agreed.
I called my GP. He saw me that day. He immediately - with only a glance - declared it to be MRSA. He called my stomach surgeon to see if he would take it off. He prescribed antibiotics and antibiotic skin cream. My stomach surgeon declined and I saw a local surgeon.
The local surgeon put on a pair of gloves, poked at it and declared it to be - a suture from a past surgery that had worked its way to the surface. He took it off anyway, did a culture to be sure, but it turned out to be nothing.
My GP is prone to over-reacting, so I am now searching for a new one.
Yeah, Zsofia, IANAD and all, but that sure sounds MRSAey (or, to be more precise, Staph-ey) to me. Bug bites simply shouldn’t be visible for more than a couple of days.
Kalhoun, MRSA is just staph. We’ve *all *got staph on us (mostly on our skin, but also commonly on our mucus membranes) at all times, but it’s usually not a problem. When we break the skin, however, then the bacteria can cause infection. Staph is one of the most common infections in minor wounds. It’s also the bacteria that can cause Toxic Shock Syndrome if you use a too-strong tampon or leave it in too long. We can’t totally eradicate it because we’ll just pick it up again the next time we touch someone else.
MRSA is just a particular varietal of staph that is immune to a group of common antibiotics. It’s becoming more common as antibiotic overuse and misuse has inadvertently encouraged the growth of antibiotic resistant staph bacteria. Hello Again probably had Vancomycin-resistant Staph, which is again, staph that’s immune specifically to the antibiotic Vancomycin. It’s not a different organism from “regular” staph any more than you and I are two different species because you have brown hair and I have blond - we’re both humans, but with slightly different genes.
Sinus infections are usually caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Moraxella catarrhalis. While staph can play a role in chronic sinus infections, it’s usually not the primary cause.
I really wish I hadn’t taken a swig of drink as I started this sentence. :eek:
They colonize the nose and then when you pick/wipe/scratch your nose you transfer them to other parts of the body, where they can enter through the pores around hair follicles. They can live in your nose without causing lesions in your nose because your nose doesn’t often have tears or breaks in the skin in the front part of the lower nostrils. They can be killed, if they’re in your nose, by applying an antibacterial cream to the nostrils, usually with a cotton swab. A week to ten days of swabbing the nose at bedtime is the general treatment I believe.
Sinus infections are different from staph colonizations. Colonizations are basically staph germs which are sort of hibernating until they get somewhere they can flourish. Sinus infections are flourishing colonies of bacteria somewhere further up the nasal passage into the sinuses. The brain is separated from the sinuses by a layer of bone, and infections CAN cross from one to the other, but I don’t believe it is very common. They’re really pretty different environments.
That could have been VRSA Vancomycin Resistant Staph. This is a slightly newer strain of staph and is probably more difficult to treat. MRSA can be killed with vancomycin, and it’s been a common treatment. Unsurprisingly, vancomycin resistant strains are now on the rise. VRSA is something a lot of state health agencies are very concerned about. I know it’s reportable in Texas, meaning if a doctor has a patient with a VRSA infection they have to report it to the state health agency. The state really doesn’t want an outbreak of this stuff because there are only a couple of current antibiotics which kill VRSA. An increase in VRSA would mean an increase in using those antibiotics and a subsequent possibility of staph strains developing resistance to Cipro.
Enjoy,
Steven
Hmm, mine never hurts. Just itches.