The moral?....Wash your cuts boys & girls!!

WARNING: SOME GRAPHIC PICTURES OF MY HUSBANDS NAKED LEG. ALSO A LOOONG STORY TO GO WITH IT.......

Many of you know that Dave is an avid mountain biker. He rides just about every Saturday morning at 6am with a group of friends. He took advantage of his extra day off work last Monday and went riding that morning with two other guys. Its not weird for the guys to take a fall now and then when they hit a jump wrong. Dave actually doesn't bail very often. This trip, he took a jump wrong and his pedal swung back and smacked him right hard in the shin. It hurt pretty bad but just barely broke the skin. Not a big deal for a mountain biking accident. He walked it off. It began to throb a bit at work on Tuesday but he even played basketball that night.

He ended up with some kind of virus that hit him that night around 11pm. He began throwing up and continued for 7 hours, getting up about every 45 minutes or so. He was stuck in bed Wednesday and Thursday recouperating from this GI bug. All the while, his leg is starting to feel worse everyday. Thursday night he was able to hold down his food finally but now he couldn't move his leg enough to even get up and walk to the bathroom. He was crawling on the floor to get there. It had swollen up pretty bad and we couldn't figure out what was going on...was it just bruised really bad? Had he possibly cracked the bone? Wouldn't that have hurt bad right away instead of waiting days to happen? It was bad enough Thursday, that I made him a docter's appt. for Friday morning. He could barely get to the bathroom, we decided he'd need some crutches to help get him to the car and to the Dr.s office. (A HUGE thank you to all the ward members willing to give us crutches in such short notice!) It took him about 45 minutes to get downstairs to shower and get dressed and into the car, this usually only takes him about 10 minutes. So the docter took a look at his leg and seemed pretty concerned. It hadn't even occured to us that his leg was infected, but that's the diagnosis. Even though his scrapes from the biking accident were minimal, they were big enough to get some bad bacteria in there. His whole right leg from the knee down was red and swollen from his small cuts getting infected. The Dr. prescribed an antibiotic and some Vicodin for the pain. WOW, I can't believe this is all from an infected scrape. He can't walk, he can't go up and down the stairs, it takes him a good 10 minutes to get himself to the bathroom a few feet away.
(this is his ankle all swollen, it looked much worse yesterday. Notice you can't even see the bone.)

This has been quite an experience for me. I have a hard enough time being 6 months pregnant and taking care of all the kids needs. Now I've got Dave to take care of too. It doesn't matter that my back hurts from going up and down the stairs so much, that I was getting up in the middle of the night to take care of Dave's needs and not getting to nap later. I'm not complaining, it's just a bit exhausting. My house looks like it was hit by Hurricane Gustav, but that's okay, taking care of my family is more important. Charity truly is the pure love of Christ. I am grateful for the opportunity to gain a testimony of service and charity through serving my husband. I'm so grateful for those who were inspired to help our family at this time of need. My sweet visiting teacher Vanessa brought us dinner last night and my neighbor Hilari brought us dinner that I could freeze and I'll use on Sunday. My wonderful mom took Logan and Mason to the movies last night to get them off my hands, that was so helpful.
Unfortunately, this isn't over. He's getting better but these kind of infections don't go away over night. The Vicodin isn't working that well either so he's still in a lot of pain. He should be better by the end of next week hopefully. We appreciate all of your prayers!
(These pics don't really do his infection justice, my White Balance was a bit off I think. It's much more red than it appears in the picture. )