Spider Bites ?

 The other morning we had our first Ability Group Run physical training session here at OCS. The way AGR works is they break the whole company down into a couple of different run groups based on our performance in the last PT test. Everyone with a sub 14 minute two-mile time falls out in the Alpha group, infamously dubbed the “A-Train”, throughout the Army. Since I ran my two-mile in 13:32 in my last PT Test, I knew I was going to have to roll out with A-Train. I ran A-Train at Basic and it wasn’t all that bad, but I knew OCS was going to be different, and the run did not disappoint. It was a steady clip for 5 miles, which we completed in under 40 minutes, with some Iron Mikes thrown into the middle. We finished the rail off with 25 pull-ups behind the barracks at the mini obstacle course set up. I was gassed out, but I’d hung in there and for that I was proud.

            As we partnered up to do our pull-ups and step up to the bar, I saw a spider web right where my hand needed to go, with a small brown spider on the end. I hesitated for a second; if I had been in the civilian world I probably would have moved onto another bar or found a way to clear the web without using my hand. But as things were I wasn’t going to do that there, at the end of a hard A-Train workout with a Ranger Captain and a Ranger SSG. “Umm excuse me, I can’t do my pull-ups here, because there is a spider in my way”. Can you imagine? These were men who had certainly braved through far worse. So I confidently brushed the web away with my hand.

            After a marathon workout like the one we had that morning, my body usually goes numb from all the excess dopamine flowing through my system. I knew I was going to be soar, real soar in my thighs in particular, but it just doesn’t take affect until about mid-day. I was doing my best to hydrate when I got my first charlie horse of the cycle in the middle of class around eleven o’clock. The pain was coming, but I was alright. Soar muscles are in a strange category of mildly pleasurable pain, and for an athlete, it can become addictive. My thighs were soar, my latissimus dorsi were soar, my forearms were soar, and I was feeling good.

            I was standing in the line for mid-day chow, however, when I noticed, through all the other signals my body was registering, a sharper, more local pain on the inner thigh of my right leg. It felt like a skin burn, from chaffing. It was rubbing against my ACU pant leg and was quite irritating. I must have not worn my spandex boxers on the run this morning, I wondered to myself. That was annoying and I would pay for it I thought. Nothing to be done about it though.

            In the afternoon we broke down into platoons and went to various stations to learn about different weapons and communication systems. We spent about an hour on the M-4 assault rifle, which is a shorter lighter version of the M-16, essentially, and an hour or so on the claymore anti-personnel mine. Around half way through SSG Candyman’s (not his real name) colorful presentation relating the claymore to the anatomy of a woman, I started to notice that along with the previous sensitive spot on my inner thigh, I noticed I was itching and feeling tender on my other thigh, in two places. I didn’t think too much of it, but I decided that when I got the chance I should give it a look and see what was going on.  When we got back after suppertime chow to the barracks I went to the latrine, stepped into a stall and dropped my trousers to have a look at what was causing me this pain. I found three  almost identical bumps, about half the size of a dime dark red in the middle and lighter red circle expanding outward, however very faintly. They were all very soar to the touch. All of a sudden I thought back to the little brown spider I had pushed away from the pull-up bar earlier that morning. “Son of a bitch” I gritted through my teeth, pulled up my pants and walked back to my room. Nothing I can do about it now, I thought. And so I kept trucking along.

            The next morning we didn’t really have PT. We practiced putting ourselves into the extended rectangle formation, the formation in which we do stretching and calisthenics. The cadre knew we were all soar as hell from the day before and so we only did but a handful of push-ups and side straddle hops (the jumping jack) and that was it. It was a nice reprieve. Right from the start of the day, however, I was somewhat concerned that my spider bites seemed to be causing me more pain than they had been the day before.  Especially the one on my inner right thigh, which rubbed against my shorts and pants legs and was very irritating. I just figured it was the venom running it course and I would be getting over it in another couple of days. I didn’t think it was anything more serious than a slightly annoying bug bite and a pain in my rear.

            The pain continued to grow through Friday and by Saturday I was a little more concerned. I started asking others for advice. Most of the guys either told me to just let it be, or to pop them and drain some of the puss. One of the bites in particular was getting bigger and the red circle was expanding outward and it was getting more tender all the time. Eventually, around 16:00 on Saturday, I realized that I was going to have to seek some medical attention. The pain was getting quite sharp and I was limping in my left leg when I’d walk. So I went to see the Duty Trainer, who happened to be one of my platoon trainers, who I’ll just call SFC Skinny. Skinny may be a very intelligent individual, but he comes across as a bit aloof and awkward. I showed him my bite and he didn’t seem to have much of a reaction.  I asked him if I could get a sick hall slip to go to the Troop Medical Center the following morning. He casually explained to me that the TMC was closed on the weekends and that if I needed medical attention I would have to go to the emergency room.  I decided I could wait until Monday morning, because I didn’t want to go to the ER. It wasn’t like my leg was falling off, I thought to myself.

            Still the pain continued to grow, incrementally and I couldn’t focus on much else at this point. The red circle on my thigh was larger than a baseball and the center was quite dark and hard. Something was wrong and I was, admittedly, a little scared at this point. But I did the best I could to assure myself that everything would be ok and that I would get some help in just another 36 hours. 

            By this time most of the guys in the platoon knew about my spider bites. In the shower room I was showing the guys who didn’t. It made me feel a little better at least to hear their hoos and awes and watch them make funny faces and say “Jesus Christ”. It made me laugh a little which at least made me feel better physically. Then one of the guys I showed it to got a very serious look on his face. He squinted his eyes and bent down to have a closer look. He said, “Hey man that’s a brown recluse bite”. I said no way, brown recluse bites act a lot quicker. But he insisted “Man listen, I’ve had a couple of brown recluse bites and that is exactly what they look like. If you don’t get that taken care of it is going to start eating away at your flesh”. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a brown recluse, so while his warning was disconcerting, I continued on my way up to my room and got in bed with my book. I would get some help on Monday and it was all going to be fine, I reassured myself.  

            Not more than five minutes later I heard Officer Candidate Strong say my name down the hall. “Calhoun” I heard her call in her thick, muffled accent. “I hope he don’t have to go to the emergency room” she said very straight forward to someone else. I sat up and put my book down just as she appeared in my doorway demanding to see the bite on my leg. You see Officer Candidate Strong is a prior service medic, with combat experience, so she is actually an authority. Even if she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have refused her request to inspect it. She isn’t the kind of woman you want to mess with. She’s quite boisterous and truculent. Lucky for me, I am on her good side.

            I pulled back my left short leg to show her the bite and surrounding rash. She looked concerned. Behind her by now was another former medic. The two of them asked me a couple of questions and then suggested that I go to the emergency room immediately. At first I resisted, “It’ll be okay guys, I don’t need to go to the emergency room”. But they persisted. By now two or three more prior service folks had wandered into my room to see what all the fuss was over. Officer Candidate Special Forces (thus titled because he was formerly a SF Weapons Sergeant), in his very “as a matter of fact” way, pointed at my leg and said “If you let that get any worse, they are going to be digging out all of the flesh out of your leg there”. That was all that needed to be said.

            I put on my PT uniform, enlisted a battle buddy with a car, got the ok from SFC Skinny, who was as aloof as ever, and I was off to the emergency room at 22:00 on a Saturday night. I was very thankful for Officer Candidate Darjeeling, who didn’t hesitate for even a second when I asked him to take me to the ER. It was going to be a 4 or 5 hour affair, we both knew. That is the way it is at a busy ER, if you’re lucky, in the middle of the night. It took us about a half hour to get there, as neither of us had ever been to the hospital before.

            I signed in at the front desk with my military ID. About ten minutes later I was called into a diagnostics room where an extremely obese nurse took my vital signs, asked me the usual “Are you on any drugs, are you allergic to this or that” kind of questions. Then she sent me back out to the waiting room. It was a depressing scene out there. A couple of mothers with their ailing children, a spotting of depressed looking basic training soldiers, and a couple there with their adult, down syndrome daughter, who was sitting in a wheel chair with a rosary in her hand praying. I tired not to stare. I read an article about Eminem’s comeback album in Entertainment magazine. Officer Candidate Darjeeling was outside on the phone, probably with his wife, and I was glad.  I was too tired and worried to carry on an interesting conversation. I just wanted to see a doctor, get some treatment and go back to the barracks and go to sleep.

            Eventually I was called into the inspection room. I sat there alone, in solitary confinement, looking at the gurney in front of me. It made me think of my sister and her last visit to the emergency room, when she was going into anaphylactic shock and they had to rush her down the hallway on a gurney sticking needles and IVs in her on the way down. At least that’s the way my mother tells the story. Here I was miles from family and home and I was wondering why. The intellectual answer is always easy, but the gut is harder to read. Is it worth it? I asked myself. “I could be at home right now, lying in bed with Maya”. I sighed at the thought. I consoled myself that there was nothing about home that protected one from the displeasure of spider bites or hospital trips. I thought of my sister again as I looked back up at the gurney.

            Suddenly the doctor entered the room. Right from the moment he entered, before I even turned my head to look at him directly, I saw that he was deformed.  As I glanced up at him quickly I could tell right away he was the victim of a severe burn. All his hair was gone, his scalp and ears scarred. What was left of his ears, I should say.  I tried not to stare; my eyes quickly darted down to his rank. He was a Major. He asked me what was going on and how he could help me. I showed him my leg and told him how the former medics in my platoon had told me that I needed immediate attention. He said that they had done me right. He started poking my “bite”, inspecting it and explaining that the surrounding redness was cellulitis. I forget what he said about the center, the technical term he used. His hands and arms, I noticed, were also scarred from some traumatic burn. It must have been a very painful experience. What was odd about him was that other than the burns, he was the perfect specimen of a man. He was tall, maybe 73 inches, broad shoulders, medium waist, muscular, with deep, penetrating blue eyes. No signs of weakness or pain, despite the clear evidence of this traumatic experience.

            “So is it brown recluse bite?” I asked him in way that must have betrayed my confusion, because he almost laughed. He informed me that in fact my spider bite was not a spider bite at all, but was a soft tissue infection, probably provoked by an in-grown hair. I was even more confused now. What about the other “bites”, the ones that hadn’t blown up. His explanation was that these things tend to pop up in groups like that, when your immune function is compromised, or at least that is what I understood.  He told me that there were two things he could do. He was going to put me on antibiotics, for sure, but he wasn’t sure if it was necessary to cut it open and drain it there. I have had a cyst lanced before and I know how painful it can be, so I wasn’t jumping at the idea, but the way my leg looked, I wasn’t against the idea either. It was under a lot of pressure.  He decided, however, that it was unnecessary to drain it just then, but he wanted me to go to the TMC first thing Monday and get it checked out.  And as suddenly as he had entered, he was gone.

            I returned to my previous seat on the side of the room. It was already 12:30. I felt terrible about making Darjeeling wait. I owed the universe big for that kind of generosity. Getting sick or injured is humbling like that. I looked back down at the gurney in front of me and thought about the Major. He must have gotten those burns in combat. What if I got burns like those, would I be able to keep myself together, to continue on doing my job and living life? I suppose I wouldn’t have any choice. In my weariness I wondered if I would die before I saw my family again, if I was going to be becoming more intimate with the world of gurneys. Death sat there in the room with me, on that gurney, and I was not so much scared in that moment as I was dejected; upset to not have chosen to stay at home with my love. I was going to die in combat, I thought, and I would have spent the last year of my life without the one I love.

            I got my antibiotics and we were back at the barracks by 2:00. We checked in with SFC Skinny and went to sleep. I thanked Darjeeling again for his invaluable generosity. He was cool about the whole thing. He is prior service and a good teammate and a good soldier.  I owe him a great deal and am very thankful he is in my platoon. Aside from helping me in my moment of need, he is a very helpful and cheerful comrade. He is also very intelligent and able to talk politics and economics at a level that is rare in the Army. He reads the FT and the Economist. And he knows quite a bit of history, even though his Master’s is in Mathematics or Computer Science, I forget which one.

            Sunday I laid real low and started my regime of antibiotics. I was a little disappointed, because I guess I was expecting the sort of immediate results we have become accustomed to expect with everything these days. My leg didn’t get any better. If anything the pain was getting more acute. I just spent most of the day sleeping, feeling sorry for myself, and reading The Battle of Mogadishu. Good book, nice to read because it is the account of that famous battle as told by like five or six of the guys who were there. Each one writes his own personal account of his experience of that chaotic day in Somalia, and so each account is self containing and it is easy to read one account, put the book down for a couple of days, as training might require and then pick it up again, without feeling out of sync.  Anything was good to get me from counting the minutes until the TMC would open on Monday. I needed some pain-killers, or something. I needed this thing on my leg to stop growing. It was terribly frustrating. I hated being crippled and having to go to sick call.

            Monday morning I went to sick hall and where I met with a civilian Physician’s Assistant who’s bedside manner was impeccable. He calmed me right down. He explained to me, however, that what I had was a MRSA Staph infection. I was taken back by that, because I have always heard of Staph as something rather serious. But his voice was calm and I was too, for the time being. He explained that the bacteria lives on our skin and normally doesn’t cause us any trouble, but that it can get into small cuts or in-grown hairs and can cause serious infections like the one I was suffering. He further explained that there were two treatment options I could choose from. I could keep taking the antibiotics, which would start to take affect in the next week and then it would take maybe 2 to 3 weeks for my body to completely drain itself of all the nasty stuff in the leg. Or they could cut my leg open drain the concentrated, blistered ball of puss in the center of my infection, irrigate it with a hydrogen peroxide solution and pack it with an anti-bacterial gauze. I would be back to normal, within a week.  It didn’t take me long to decide. Given the pain I was in I was ready for the blade.

            I won’t go into graphic detail about the operation. It was short and painless, thanks to the most powerful anesthetic I have ever used. The PA made an incision at the center of the infection, about an inch long, maybe a centimeter and a half deep and drained all the puss and blood that was filled there. He washed it out like he said he would and then packed the wound with medicated gauze that would wick out whatever bits of bacteria he hadn’t cut out. He sent me on my way with a prescription of non-narcotic pain killers and instructions to come back for the next couple of days to have the gauze removed, the wound washed and checked, and then repacked.

            Almost immediately my leg started to feel better. It was still red and swelling across most of my left thigh, but a lot of the pressure had been relieved. I went to class and continued on with my day, feeling better, though perhaps still a bit dejected and apprehensive. I was worried about how long the wound would take to heel. I had a march coming up on Wednesday and a 3-mile release run on Friday that both counted towards the OML, where I am battling to stay in competition for a good branch selection. From 20:00 to 21:00 we had study barracks and instead studying my notes from class, I went online and started doing some research into Staph infections. This didn’t help. It seemed everything I read heavily stressed the serious health risks involved with a Staph infection. The PA had neglected to inform me that if it spreads to your lymph nodes and goes systemic it can be lethal. I felt light headed. I felt sick to my stomach.

            At 21:15 I grabbed my cell phone and went to call Maya. In the eternal battle between the strong, sage, and sane self, and the weak, petty, and desperate self, I was losing. Here I was, calling my wife to unload on her all of my anxiety, my worries and fears. I knew it was wrong. It was unfair to her, who was so far away and could do nothing to help me. But I needed to let it out. I was scared. Scared of getting more sick than I already was, scared of being recycled out of Bravo company, scared of losing my spot at OCS. And Maya listened calmly as I shared with her all of my worst fears and pieces of self-pity. I whined “I am just upset that this had to happen to me right now while I am here in training, it is just so frustrating”. Maya sucked up all of my sickness, my festered spirit and breathed back into me the spirit of life I needed in my moment of despair. “Honey, all of the great people in history, the ones you admire, they weren’t great because they never had any trials, they were great because they worked through them. This is just one of your trials.” However simple, her words were true and they gave me the spiritual succor I needed.

            In the past week my infection has almost completely subsided with the help of my antibiotics. My wound is also healing very quickly, though not as quickly as I would like, because I still have to go in everyday to get it cleaned and repacked. It shouldn’t be too much longer until they cut me loose, maybe another 4 or 5 days. Everyday is a pain though, because I keep missing PT every morning and I feel like I am falling behind my peers. It is an awful feeling, but one I try to keep in perspective. I missed the 5-mile march and the 3-mile release run last week, but I will be able to make those up without penalty. I just want to get better as soon as I can so I can get back to training. I am here to train and it is a very humbling and frustrating experience to be on the sidelines when all you want to do is get in the game.

            I owe a much thanks and praise at the end of a long week to all my battle buddies who have helped me and cared for me in a hundred different ways, to my wife who is my rock, my foundation and my well of wisdom, to Mark Bauer and Joe Gordon who have been a source of support for me throughout some of my darkest moments in my training, and to my Lord Jesus Christ. Above all I try to remember that I am fortunate to be alive, that each pain is a blessing in this world and that I owe nothing but praise to my Maker, the Almighty.