MRSA Support Group
Staph infections are infections caused by the bacteria Staphylococcus. They include skin infections, pneumonia, blood poisoning, toxic shock syndrome, and food poisoning. Infection can happen through contact, especially if you have open wounds. Most infections are treatable with antibiotics. If you have been infected with staph, join the group for support and advice.
Hi everybody :
Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with MRSA. I live in Florida. Anyway, I have a nurse coming to my home daily to do the leg wrappings. The worst is on my lower left leg........just above the ankle. But, it IS getting worse. And, I can't say anything to ANY doctors about this. Once they know about this (at least here in Florida), I could run the risk of being discharged as a patient. I DO see a doctor at a local Infectious Disease Office. But, far as I know.....they don't know I have MRSA. They just say it IS a pretty severe wound. Anyway.........I know this is a death sentence. All the information that I've gathered says that, once this gets to the "point of no return", it DOES have deadly consequences. So....it's just a daily routine of dealing with the shame. Yes......the shame. With AIDS, a person's immune system is destroyed. With MRSA, a person's immune system is damaged....which could STILL lead to deadly consequences. Sometimes, I DO get overwhelmed with this. Other times, I try not to think about it. Even though the physical pain, sometimes is quite severe. So......for now......I notified my (biological) sister about this........in case this situation goes sour. Here, in Florida, you don't let ANYONE know about this. It IS a stigma I have to deal with.
stanulg52
My own MD is a good doctor, an internist. He has been supportive, and has offered several suggestions. They are almost all working on the level of lore, not of science. The one exception I know of is a different dermatologist at the same teaching hospital where the man who treated me with aversion until I reminded him, indirectly, that I was a professor at the same university. The one exception has done a study of a medication that has been helpful to me. Unfortunately for the patient community, the medicine is a medieval one, so it can't be patented and sold for googobs of money.
On my own, I tried all sorts of things. Curad silver solution had some effectiveness. The medicine the med school professor was working on uses copper instead of silver, but its other ingredients are surely important too. There is also a Curad Germ Shield that uses silver. I've never seen it, but it may work better than the other one. I think it is a later product.
The one kind of thing that has worked all along is the "advanced healing" bandages. I like the ones that are only sold at Food Lion because they are thicker and sturdier. I think that they work because they prevent the MRSA from protecting itself in a biological plaque. These colloidal bandages work by preventing the wound from scabbing over. With no scab to lurk in, the germs are out in the moist wound where the immune cells have free access to them. I may have to remove ones that get so filled with fluid that the pressure makes them painful, but each time I pull one off, clean the wound, and put another one on, I am tossing out a load of dead staph germs. My immune system is o.k., it just needs to be able to get at the germs.
I have noticed that after a wound seems to have healed there then forms some kind of keratosis over the spot where the wound was, and there must be some MRSA hiding in there because the disease can become active again under those weird patches on top of my normal skin.
The medieval medication is called Bald's eye salve. (You can google for it.) The original recipe, translated into modern English, lists the ingredients, but not the proportions. I'm a cook, and my grandma never read a recipe in her life, so I did things grandma's way. You have to grind garlic and onions, add ox bile (which you can actually get via Amazon or your local health food store), pour in enough ordinary red wine to fit, pour into a bronze flask, let sit for two weeks (and somewhere along the way you've got to strain out the pulp from the onions and garlic). I didn't want to pay $50 for a real bronze flask, so I settled for $8 of bronze screws that I put in a quart canning jar with the other ingredients.
The first time I used it, I didn't have much hope for it. I had an infection on one of the fingers of my right hand. It had formed a deep pit with some blood seeping out of the bottom. It was time for bed when I decided to try my new concoction, so I just put a few drops into the pit and went to bed.
In the morning when I woke up I discovered that the wound was capped over by something that looked like cured JB Weld apoxy glue. It was gray with a tinge of the color of the wine. It was on the wound for the long term. The wound healed!
Since then I"ve never had the right conditions for the ox bile to make artificial skin over a wound, but this preparation has never failed to kill off a sore within a few applications/few days. I always rub the solution around in the wound until it feels like I've gotten any chunky bits of scab or whatever may be in there besides blood and medicine.
Sometimes I get an infection of just the surface of a region of skin on, e.g., my shoulder blades. Sometimes I try treating the infection with povidone iodine, or with some other antiseptic that is handy, but it usually doesn't work. so I stop being lazy, dig the quart jar out of the fridge, dampen a Q-tip of a small piece of paper towel or kleenex with Bald's potion, rub the affected skin with it, and with no more than a couple more applications the infection goes away.
I don't know whether this works because of some personal peculiarity or not. All I know is that medical people from the USA to India have used the potion on patients and haven't reported any bad effects from it.
I am not an MD, and I certainly can't say anything more than that it is something that has worked for me.