So I thought my Cow Bite wound was healing pretty good….it sure looked that way.
It looked good to my untrained eye, but when I saw the resident doctor for the follow-up, he clearly wasn’t happy with the wound. He said that from its colour, it isn’t healing. If it were, the colour should be pink, but it isn’t. So he said he should do a lancing OR I could wait another day to see if it gets any better.
By now, truthfully, I’m already getting so tired of nursing this stupid wound, so I told him to just lance it. It would be done under a local anaesthesia with a straight cut. A STRAIGHT CUT, not circular and no, I’m not going to lose any skin in this. So I agreed. Just do it, doctor.
So the good doctor started by injecting the local anaesthesia that took its time to work. Then, he did the cut, all of which I did not watch else I might have fainted. But that didn’t quite help as I was in a sitting position and after awhile, I was sure I was going to pass out (which is a common occurrence with me), so I told him I had to lie down with my legs elevated.
He let me lie down with legs elevated and slowly, the going-to-faint spell passed. I don’t know how long it took, but it took quite some time. The other doctor (the one who said he wanted to cut a circular piece of skin out two days ago) did come to look in as well. As the doctor was doing the procedure, he said there was a lot of slough (dead cells) trapped in the wound, and the wound was sealing up, so the trapped slough will cause it not to heal. Hence, the lancing was required to clean up the slough. The doctor also said that actually the wound was very shallow and only superficial (he mentioned 0.2mm) and yet, it caused such havoc!! So folks, even a tiny wound from an animal bite can cause a lot of harm. Please be aware. The doctor said it is because animal teeth have a lot of pathogens, so their bites are polymicrobial.
Finally, it was all done. I told the doctor my skin could not agree with yesterday’s bandage so he used a waterproof bandage instead. So yay, I can take a bath comfortably without having to avoid the wound from getting wet.
The doctor said it would take a week to heal and I would need to go back daily for dressing, for a week. Well, this is sure better than having skin removed and taking a month to heal!
Cow Mau, your bite is definitely worse than your growls!! And they are expensive too!
Cow Mau, the armoured truck, the tank!