Harping on

By now, I doubt I have any readers who don't know of my bursitis. To summarise its progress, though, it arose around the 5th or 6th inst., having been heralded by something resembling a large and exceedingly angry zit. I popped that, and the next day, my elbow was swollen, red, hot and tender to the touch, and felt like a highly pressurised bag of water. All in all, a classic presentation of bursitis caused by an infection. My hypothesis is that I was bitten by an insect, providing a vector for some nasty bacterium to invade, but really, the cause is not entirely important.

On the Friday of the first week, I took it to my doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and ice. The ice helped, but the initial antibiotics didn't; I turned out to be allergic to them. The second attempt worked out better; I finished taking those on Sunday, and by then the pressure was much reduced.

As of today, I'm declaring the trouble officially over. I can find no trace of the inflammation, there's no pain, and the elbow doesn't look significantly different from its pre-bursitis appearance, with one exception.

The skin has much improved. For as long as I can remember caring, that elbow has had exceedingly dry skin, and nothing has been willing to help much. While the bursitis was stretching the skin, the horrible dry layers were abraded gently off by my shirtsleeves, and now that it's gone down, I find that the skin beneath is smooth and in good condition. I shall have to take care to keep it that way.