I showed the doc at one of my medical research places my blisters and she totally freaked out. Said it looked like staph and it was spreading and I needed to get to the ER asap and get it cultured.

I had a counseling appt by the hospital, so I hit that first. (I'll post on that later). Then I went to the ER. Sat for three hours before I was seen by anyone. The first nurse was dumbfounded. Had a second nurse come in. They'd never seen anything like it. So I'm marked "Level 2" and sent to "THE RED ZONE" (whatever that means).

There was a woman (about the size of a city bus) that had been hit by a city bus. When the medical staff was around, she moaned and cried about how awful the pain on her calf was. When the medical staff was gone, she and her mother were talking about how they were going to get a boatload of money from the city. And she was hopping up out of the chair to grab her daughter's popcorn and soda from.

So, at hour 7 of my wait. (Glad to know I'm not dying or anything), nurse #3 comes in. She's the senior nurse. She looks at the blisters and says "you've just burnt yourself and you don't remember." I advised her that most burn blisters don't spread over your body overnight and get worse and have red streaks growing in length from them.

She said "you're PACe'd". (Like I'm supposed to know what that means?) I told her that my doctor said the blisters needed to be cultured for staph infection.

She said 'we're too busy for that right now. Go sit down. I'll take a look at it in another 6 hours and decide if it needs a culture." I told her that I needed to lay down immediately and I could not last another 6 hours standing up (they were out of seats - mostly family members waiting).

BTW, if someone is in the ER, is it REALLY necessary to bring 12+ members of your family for a hairline fracture of your foot?

So, I said that I was going home. And you see why I love going to the hospital?