My stepbrother Chris used to have a pet store. Among other things, he sold mice and rats. Some folks made pets out of them, but most of them were snake food.
When you keep mice and rats around continuously, one’s going to get out from time to time. So it wasn’t unusual for there to be a renegade rodent loose in the shop. This was no big deal. Someone would happen upon it eventually, and scoop him up, and no harm done.
So my dad happened upon a loose rat in the bathroom one day. He bent down and got his hand around him. As he passed his other hand by to grab the sink to help himself up, the rat jumped out of his closed fist and bit down hard on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Dad squeezed him until he let go, but the rat was still clamped down for a good five seconds. Dad dropped him back in the cage, dressed his injury, and that was that.
Except that wasn’t that. The wound got better for a day or so, then stopped, then got worse. Kept hurting. Got puffy. Dad started taking maximum-plus-a-bit-more OTC analgesics for the pain. Finally, on the fourth or fifth night, there were hints of toxic striations. He met his primary care physician at the ER, he shot him in the butt with a massive dose of antibiotics, and told him to come back in the morning if it wasn’t visibly better.
It wasn’t. Dad went to the hospital. They admitted him and started trying different antibiotics in his IV. I took off work to sit with him. He felt fine, so he had his briefcase and his phone, and kept working from the bed. I ran to get him a Hardee’s burger for lunch.
The infection was extremely aggressive by then; so much so that you could see a difference in the size of his wound from one hour to the next. We looked at the rate and morbidly, yet still somewhat amusedly, calculated that his thumb would fall off if they didn’t solve the problem in the next day or so. It was something to see.
(We laughed genuinely, but there was a nervous undercurrent to it. It was pretty damned scary.)
It was early the next morning before they finally tried something that would reliably and expeditiously kill what he had (a particularly aggressive and drug-resistant strain of Streptococcus, as it turned out). After he was unambiguously getting better, his doctor dropped by and told him that when he presented that morning, he had about 12 hours left.
To live.
I was reminded of all of this when a coworker was bitten by her cat this week, and wisely saw about it quickly. Folks, if you get any sort of laceration or abrasion that gets worse, not better, go have it looked at promptly. If an infection takes hold, it can take you out a lot more quickly than you may think.
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