Read On: Even a scratch can be potentially dangerous

Please allow me for a moment to share in the ongoing drama that is my life. It doesn’t take much for life-and-death struggle to break out at any moment.

All it really takes is a scratch. Literally.

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So I’m going about my business a couple of weeks ago when I run into something and scrape the lower half of my leg. We’re talking tiny. Barely broke the skin. Maybe a 1/4-inch cut. The kind of stuff we get every day and completely ignore, because it’s nothing.

That’s what I do. I pay it no mind. This is on Tuesday, Feb. 23. By that Friday, I notice that the area I scraped is looking a little puffy and inflamed. By Saturday, I see that it’s starting to swell up and growing increasingly painful. I figured, heck, I guess I scraped it a little bit worse than I thought.

Sunday comes and now I see that the area around the original tiny scratch is ringed by an angry-looking red discoloration of some sort. By that night, the entire lower part of my leg has ballooned to nearly twice its normal size and I can barely walk. It’s also beet red and literally hot to the touch.

But genius that I am, I still figure, oh well, it’ll go away. Takes a mallet smashed atop my head before I realize, “Oh, I think there may be a threat of some sort to my well-being.”

I’m concerned enough, however, that I get on the Internet that night to do a little bit of research. That’s my version of visiting a doctor. And what I find online assures me that I’ve got something called Cellulitis that has nothing to do with being overweight and everything to do with infection.

“Get to a doctor — now!” the Internet screams at me, “unless you’re a complete moron.” My wife’s struggle to remain poker-faced when looking at the leg while concurring that therapeutic intervention might be a prudent course of action seals the deal that this probably ain’t going away on its own.

Armed with my trusty self-diagnosis, I limp into an urgent care center in Burbank on Monday night and tell the doc on duty what I’ve decided this is. She gives me a look that says, “Thanks, pal, but I would be the medical professional and you the patient, so kindly button it.”

After doing a few prods and squeezes, however, the doctor concurs with my assessment — telling me that perhaps an hour in cyberspace provides as good an education as eight years in med school. Or maybe I’m just a genius. Or quite possibly I’m just lucky.

Indeed, the doctor makes it clear that I’m fortunate to have had the wherewithal to come in for treatment of something that could have turned catastrophic if I’d waited a lot longer.

“It’s probably a staph infection,” she offered.

What would have happened had I not come in and tried simply to let it heal on its own?

“Oh, you’d probably have died,” she assured me, just that simply.

“Um, died?” I replied.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “This is the kind of stuff that used to kill people all the time. The bacteria would take them down. That’s why penicillin was the great medical invention of our time. It stopped all sorts of people from dying. And that continued with all of the other antibiotics that followed. It saved millions of lives.”

Sure enough, I was prescribed an antibiotic that I was obliged to take every six hours for 10 days. Within 24 hours, the swelling and pain had disappeared. A day later, the redness and heat at the site of injury had subsided.

But I religiously followed through on the entire 10-day treatment course, because it’s the early stoppage that has allowed a whole legion of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. That included the dreaded and deadly Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus infections, or MRSAs.

So let this be a lesson, people. If you get a scratch, don’t treat it like it’s nothing. Make sure you immediately clean it with soap and warm water and even cover it with a Band-Aid just to be safe. You never know what can sneak in and make you severely ill, because lethal germs are out there lurking.

And how embarrassing would it be to die from a little scratch?

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RAY RICHMOND has covered Hollywood and the entertainment business since 1984. He can be reached via email at ray@rayrichco.com and Twitter at @MeGoodWriter.