toe infection leads to hospital visit

I believe I've already shown you a pic of my right big toe, on which I had been using nail clippers to hack away at some thick callus. I cut a wee bit too deeply, and a little red line segment was the result. Given that I've suffered much worse during my hikes, I thought nothing of this, and for a week or so, everything had been fine.

Today, however, my shoe started feeling uncomfortable, and by the evening hours, I was becoming feverish and a little dizzy. Not having looked closely at either of my feet for a while, I peeled off my shoe and sock to see what was going on. That's when I saw this:

Ho ho! That's a full-on infection! Given that it happened so fast, I decided to visit the local hospital. I took a cab to the main entrance, where I was turned around and told to visit the ER, which I hadn't wanted to do. But this is Korea, where health care is cheap, and people visit the ER for minor complaints. So I walked around the main building to where the ER was hiding, and I was told by a chirpy young nurse to fill out some paperwork, which I very slowly did, given that everything was in Korean, with plenty of medical terms.

I turned the paperwork in and waited to be called. When I was taken into reception, my blood pressure was checked, and I gave the young nurse a rapidfire patient history. My blood pressure is super-high right now, so I explained I've been holding off on meds during the pandemic, largely because I don't want to have to visit the doctor's office, where the risk of infection is high. The nurse made a face and told me I needed to take my medication.*

Anyway, the hospital's procedure is to make all patients with fevers wait 3-4 hours before going into the ER proper, do I'm out here on the hospital grounds, typing this blog entry. I'm feverish, slightly dizzy, and my right big toe hurts more and more. I'll be morbidly curious as to how I feel a few hours from now. The symptoms, which had been absent for more than a week, came on suddenly, which is cause for a little concern.

I hope to get lanced and be prescribed antibiotics. We'll see what happens. More news later, probably once I'm back at my place. It's a gorgeous night, but some mosquitoes are attracted to the glow of my cell phone's screen. Ugh.

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*I just reread the above paragraph, and I see that my logic might not be clear. I have about three weeks' worth of blood-pressure and blood-sugar meds, but I haven't been taking them during the pandemic because, if I were to run out of meds, I'd have to go to the doctor's office—something I'm currently loath to do because I'm paranoid about the possibility of infection while sitting in a waiting room with all those old, sick people, coughing and hacking and rasping. I'd rather wait out the pandemic while not taking my meds (which I can take later) than be forced to visit a pestilential doctor's office in three weeks. I hope that makes more sense, even if you disagree with my logic.