I was going to write this several days ago, but the events of the day stopped me, but I figure I will write it now.
A few years ago I made the decision that I didn't want to faff about taking the pill because I would forget to take it at the right time, or I'd forget when the week off was supposed to be. It just didn't work for me as my scatterbrained self, so I made the decision to try something a bit more drastic and get a tiny piece of plastic shot into my arm. That's not even me being that dramatic. You get anesthetic stabbed in first - I really don't do needles so this was always going to be me being a bit dramatic - and then it's kind of like a piercing gun, just without it coming out the other side of your arm (thank the gods!)
Well, anyway, these things only last for about 3 years and then you have a decision to make - is it working for you, or are you going to try something different? (Or, of course, do you want kids, which is currently a firm no from me.)
For me, it was a pretty simple decision that I had made months ago and it was one of the things that kicked me up the butt to finally changing my GP. I knew I needed to get this seen to and also the whole vegetarian/blood donor/not being careful of my iron intake causing anemia, but it was probably mainly this... This little thing in my arm means I don't have to be taking pills every day or worrying and it also means I'm not in what was pretty crippling pain one week out of every four. I mean, on the bathroom floor, in the fetal position in the middle of the night kind of pain, so to say that this was an easy decision for me is an understatement.
Now, saying that I knew what was going to happen to get it changed and it wasn't exactly taking me to my happy headspace, to say the least. Whilst I've previously had to attend A&E for having stuff embedded in my hands (cinder from a disused railway line - there is a good story there, but I'll leave that one for now) I've never had to have an interaction with a scalpel before (at least, not to my memory) and to say that I wasn't looking forward to that bit would be one of this century's biggest understatements.
If you're squeamish, don't read the next paragraph. Or the one after. Look for the TL;DR.
The theory is that after a local anesthetic is injected into the arm and given a short amount of time to work, a small "nick" is cut into the arm where the previous implant is to expose the end and then this is pulled out before the new implant is put in. The problem I had was that I have gained a good 2-2.5 stone in the last 3 years, so several layers of fat have been deposited on top of the thing, so that small "nick" ended up being my GP digging around in my arm for about ten minutes trying to get to the damn thing and get it out, which also meant that I had a massive bruise where the new one was put into a different place, so it was back to the surface of the skin, as intended. My GP asked me if I wanted to see the old implant, but I was pretty sure I had bled like a stuck pig and, while my fear is not blood, I was doing really well at keeping my vision straight and not feeling like I would lose my stomach contents, so I was more than a little reluctant.
My GP then puts adhesive stitches over it, then a big plaster and then a bandage around my arm, telling me to leave it there for a week, but be aware of infections and heavy bleeding. She also told me not to run for a week and I had to stop myself from laughing.
A couple of days in, I got really worried that doing very little with my arm had actually caused the wound to reopen and bleed, so I took all the bandaging off, cleaned it up and redid it, but my big mistake was using micropore to attach one of the bandages. That evening it savagely tore a section of my skin off, and so the zombie bite was complete. Partly a surgical scratch, partly a large colour changing bruise (about the size of a credit card) and partly this new bit where it looks like my skin had fallen off.
TL;DR It was a bit of a hellish experience, compared to what it should be and it's why I was talking about having a zombie bite on Instagram.
Whilst it's not an experience I am falling over myself to repeat, what I would say is that I recovered pretty well from it, despite some pain in the first few days, but paracetamol cleared that. I am going to have a small collection of tiny scars down my arm, but it's worth it to have one less worry on my mind. I can just leave it where it is and live my life, and there's a lot to be said for that, even if dancing around my living room like a loon was off the agenda for a few days due to injury.
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