Yesterday the doctor told me that I could stop doing the daily IV treatments and go to oral antibiotics. You’d think that would make M and myself quite happy. Instead we were (and remain) vaguely uneasy.

That’s because he’s revised his diagnosis.

After my first MRI the radiologist, the orthopedist, and my doctor–the infectious disease guy–all said that the scan indicated osteomyelitis: infection of the bone.

After this second, the radiologist and orthopedist are still saying the same thing. My doctor has decided that it’s not really osteomyelitis, buit that it’s inflamation of the outer layer of the bone due to the infection. Antinflammatories should clear that up.

Except that I’ve been taking them all along for pain…

So—I’m off the IV antibiotics and on orals. My foot still has some swelling (but not as much as there was) and it’s painful to walk too much (but I couldn’t walk at all before).

What exactly’s going on?

If I had to guess, I’d say that my doctor knows the daily schedule is hard on all of us and he doesn’t know what else he can do to go after the infection. Thus, he’s scaling back to see if it comes back or not. I kinda feel like a guniea pig…

Needless to say, we’re still going to leave the pic line in just in case. M’s suggesting I push for a bone scan which would tell us for sure whether the infection’s there or not.