Dog bite and thumb pain

It was the day before Thanksgiving, the clan had started to gather at the house we rented thanks to VRBO, and all was well. But my sister’s dog…a sweet little dachshund…was whining for her mama.

Not thinking, I went to scoop up the already anxious dog.

He bit me.

It wasn’t his fault. I know his history–he started out life as a bait dog for dog fighting.  Apparently, he was used to make the big dogs mean and angry enough to fight one another. No wonder he bites when surprised.

Anyway, it was nothing terrible, a little blood in the web between thumb and finger, a couple of bit marks on my thumb. I, of course, had to look up every dog bite site on my handy smart phone. What did they tell me?

• Wash the wound thoroughly. Apply antibiotic cream. (done.)


• Find out the dog’s rabies shot status. (done. He’s up-to-date.)


• Watch for signs of infection.

This is where I started to worry. (Have I mentioned that I might be a bit of a hypochondriac?) How quickly does infection set in? How would I know? 

My hand swelled. Or, at least, the thumb swelled and I thought maybe the forefinger did, too. I was determined to be stoic, but watch for signs of infection. Those signs are:

• Swelling


• Redness


• Red streaks radiating from it


• Fever

OK, so I had none of these, except swelling. My thumb and maybe my forefinger swelled that day and evening. My thumb was such a sausage that it wouldn’t bend. The whole hand throbbed.  It had me worried. Nonetheless, I tried to be stoic and ignore the hypochondriac voice in the back of my head. I reasoned with it: “If the swelling is worse in the morning, I’ll go to a walk-in clinic on Friday after Thanksgiving, when everything is open again.” Ahhh…the swelling was down by morning, and I could bend my thumb again. All is well.

Whew.

We cooked Thanksgiving dinner, and went on our separate ways. Well, OK, in the spirit of truthfulness I hope to have in this blog, a few other things happened that weekend: the other dachshund, who happens to be blind, fell down the steps and tore his dewclaw. More importantly, my sister-in-law took a terrible fall in the kitchen on a scrap of bacon wrapper. I now have proof that bacon is bad for you. 

My family leads accident-prone lives, I’m afraid. 

Fast-forward a few weeks to December. My sister-in-law has had to have shoulder replacement surgery because of the break caused by the fall in the kitchen (damn that bacon!). My little dog bite still hurts in the base of my thumb. 

What? I hurt my snuffbox???

Or maybe it’s really the extensor pollicis longus tendon.

Ah, I won’t self-diagnose. Off to my favorite doctor, Coleen Smith, today. She did her usual magical manipulations of my body, including my thumb. The tendon is evidently a little inflamed, as indicated by the lymph node in my armpit that’s swollen and sore. She worked the thumb and the tendon, and it feels better, if not healed. A little anticlimactic after the whole Thanksgiving weekend injury-fest, but at least she assures me that it will heal.

If you want to know more about the treatment of dog bites, try this source from WebMD, which I generally trust::
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/first-aid-animal-bites/FA00044

And my favorite place to start, Medline Plus (which doesn’t come up first in Google searches anymore; I wish it did):
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/animalbites.html