I’ve been writing this morning’s stuff from a hospital room. I had hoped that the minor infection from a dirty exacto-knife stabbing in my left palm (I mentioned this a couple of days ago, although the item seems to have strangely disappeared) would be suppressed by oral antibiotic medication. But it morphed into a systemic poisoning situation sometime on Thursday.

Dreary, mildly depressing hospital room — Saturday, 8.19, 9:45 am; far worse than a coach-level breakfast you might be served, say, on a New York to-London red-eye, and no warmer than room temperature.

It had turned my hand into a puffy bear claw by the time Thursday’s Snakes on a Plane screening was letting out. By yesterday afternoon (i.e., Friday) the infection had spread into my forearm — red streaks appeared like interstate highways on a road map — and all the way up to my left shoulder by dinner hour.
So I checked into a hospital and they hooked me up to regular (every five or six hours) antibiotic intravenous drips. The worst of it had passed by this morning, thank fortune, but if I’d been stuck out in the desert somewhere and beyond of the reach of good medicine…