PART 1

My eighteen year old daughter came into the kitchen on a Sunday morning walking with a strange, stiff limp. She is usually bouncing around the house getting ready for her shift at the grocery store, but that morning she just stood by the counter looking miserable. I asked her what was wrong. She lowered her voice and told me she had a really painful lump near her groin area. She said she first noticed it a few days prior as a tiny bump, but over the weekend it had swollen up and the pain was becoming completely unbearable.

Since it was a Sunday, her regular primary care physician was closed. I told her to get her shoes on because we were going to the urgent care center down the highway. I drove her over there, hoping we could just get a quick prescription for whatever it was and get her back home to rest.

When we arrived, the parking lot was packed. We walked up to the front sliding doors, but the security guard stopped me. Because of their strict COVID protocols, they were not letting any extra people into the waiting room or the exam rooms. Since my daughter was legally over eighteen, she was classified as an adult patient. I was not allowed to accompany her inside. I felt a knot of worry in my stomach, but she is an adult, so I told her to text me with any updates and I went back to sit in the hot car.

I sat out there scrolling on my phone and waiting. I expected her to be in there for at least an hour given how full the parking lot looked. Instead, she came walking out the sliding glass doors less than twenty minutes later. She was still walking with that stiff, painful limp, but she had her discharge papers in her hand.

I unlocked the car doors and she climbed into the passenger seat. I immediately asked her what the doctor said and what kind of medicine they prescribed.

She looked confused and frustrated. She told me she did not even see a doctor. She saw an APRN, an advanced practice registered nurse. According to my daughter, the APRN walked into the exam room, looked at her chart, and asked a few basic questions. The APRN noted that my daughter had recently received her Pfizer shot. Without a second of hesitation, the APRN declared that the painful lump was just a swollen lymph node reacting to the vaccine.

I asked my daughter what the APRN said when she examined the actual lump.

My daughter looked at me and said the APRN never examined it. She did not ask my daughter to lower her pants. She did not put on gloves. She did not even look at the affected area. She just stood by the door, blamed the Pfizer shot, and told my daughter that the swollen lymph node would go away on its own in about a month.

I was completely taken aback. I asked if they gave her antibiotics or anything for the pain. My daughter shook her head and said the APRN just told her to go home and take some over the counter painkillers.

Part of me wanted to march right into that clinic and demand to speak to someone, but the guard was standing right there and the COVID rules were completely inflexible. Plus, a medical professional had just given us an official explanation.

You want to trust the people in the white coats. You want to believe they know what they are doing. So, against my better judgment, I put the car in drive and took my daughter home. I told her we would follow the instructions and hope it went away.

PART 2

The next week and a half was an absolute nightmare for my daughter.

Instead of getting better, the pain just got worse with every passing day. My daughter works as a cashier at a very busy grocery store. Her job requires her to stand in one spot on a hard concrete floor for eight hours a day, constantly twisting and reaching to scan heavy items. The friction of her uniform pants rubbing against the groin area was causing her absolute agony.

She was doing everything she could to manage it based on what that clinic told us. We bought a moist heating pad from the pharmacy. Every single night she would come home from work, change into the loosest sweatpants she owned, and lay completely still on the living room couch with the moist heating pad pressed against her leg. She was taking ibuprofen around the clock, maxing out the daily dosage just to take the edge off the pain.

But the lump was not going away. It was doing the exact opposite. It was growing rapidly.

By the middle of the week, she showed it to me in the bathroom. I gasped. It was no longer a small bump. It had grown bigger than a golf ball. It was angry, bright red, and the skin around it looked stretched and shiny. It was warm to the touch. I felt a spike of panic, but we kept reminding ourselves that the APRN said it could take a full month to resolve. We thought maybe it had to get worse before it got better.

By the end of the week, my daughter could not take the pain anymore. She had to call out of work twice. Her managers were annoyed because they were short staffed, but she literally could not stand up straight. Every time she tried to put weight on that leg, the pressure in her groin would cause her to double over in tears. She spent her days crying in her bedroom with the heating pad, terrified that she was going to lose her job.

Then came this morning.

I was downstairs making coffee when I heard my daughter crying hysterically from the upstairs bathroom. I dropped my mug on the counter and ran up the stairs. The bathroom door was open. My daughter was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her hands covering her face, absolutely sobbing.

She had woken up in extreme pain and went to the bathroom to check the lump. It had started to bleed. There was blood and thick, foul smelling fluid seeping out of it and staining her clothes.

She looked at me with total panic in her eyes. I did not know what else to do. I grabbed a clean towel, told her to hold it against the area, and told her we were leaving right that second. We were not going back to that useless urgent care center. I helped her down the stairs, got her into the car, and drove straight to the main hospital emergency room.

PART 3

When we got to the hospital, I was not going to let anyone tell me I had to wait in the car. I walked right up to the triage desk with her. I told the triage nurse exactly what happened at the urgent care clinic ten days ago and I explained that the lump was now bleeding and larger than a golf ball. The nurse took one look at my daughter’s pale, tear stained face and immediately brought us back into an exam room. They did not try to separate us this time.

We waited for about twenty minutes before an actual emergency room physician walked in. He introduced himself, pulled up a stool, and asked my daughter to explain everything from the beginning. She told him about the first tiny bump, the Sunday urgent care visit, the APRN blaming the Pfizer shot, the lack of any physical exam, and the week and a half of pure agony that followed.

The doctor listened quietly. Then he asked my daughter to lie back on the hospital bed so he could take a look.

He put on a pair of purple gloves and gently moved the hospital gown aside. The moment he laid eyes on the lump, his entire demeanor shifted. His jaw tightened and he let out a heavy sigh.

He looked up at me and then at my daughter. He asked us, very pointedly, who exactly told us this was a lymph node.

I told him it was the APRN at the urgent care center down the street.

The doctor shook his head in pure disbelief. He pointed to the massive, bleeding mass. He told us that this was not a swollen lymph node. He explained that it was not even close to where a lymph node is anatomically located.

It was a severe, deep tissue abscess. It was a massive pocket of infection that had been left untreated for nearly two weeks. Because the urgent care clinic had completely dismissed her, the infection had been allowed to fester and grow to the point where the skin could no longer contain it. The pressure had caused it to spontaneously rupture this morning, which is why it was bleeding and leaking fluid.

The doctor explained that an abscess this size required an immediate surgical drainage procedure. We could not just take pills and go home. He had to fix it right then and there.

He called a nurse in to assist. They prepared a sterile tray with scalpels, syringes, and heavy gauze. First, he had to inject a local anesthetic directly into the inflamed, infected tissue to numb the area. My daughter squeezed my hand so hard I thought my bones were going to snap. She was crying out in pain as the burning medicine went in.

Once the area was somewhat numb, the doctor used a scalpel to open the abscess completely. The smell was horrific. He spent the next fifteen minutes aggressively pressing and draining the massive pocket of infection. He had to flush it out with saline multiple times. Then came the worst part. Because the cavity was so large, he could not just stitch it closed. He had to pack it tightly with medicated gauze ribbon so it would heal from the inside out. Pushing that gauze into the open wound caused my daughter to sob uncontrollably. It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever had to watch.

ENDING

We were in the emergency room for four hours. After the procedure was finally finished, the doctor wrote us a prescription for a very strong course of oral antibiotics. He looked at us very seriously and said we were incredibly lucky we came in when we did. If we had waited even one more day, that severe infection could have easily entered her bloodstream and caused sepsis.

I brought my daughter home this afternoon. She is currently sleeping in her bed, exhausted from the trauma of the morning and the heavy pain medication they finally gave her.

Our nightmare is far from over. For the next two weeks, we have to pull that packing gauze out of the open wound and repack it with fresh gauze every single day. The doctor warned us that it will be a very painful process, but it is absolutely mandatory to prevent the abscess from closing over and trapping a new infection inside. My daughter is terrified of the dressing changes, and I am terrified of having to cause her that kind of pain just to keep her safe. She will be out of work for at least another week, losing money she desperately needs, all because of a medical mistake.

I am sitting at my kitchen table right now, looking at the discharge papers from the hospital, and I am shaking with pure, unadulterated rage.

If that first APRN at the urgent care center had simply taken one single minute to look at my daughter. If she had just asked her to lower her pants and visually inspected the lump. She would have instantly seen that it was a surface level skin infection and not a deep lymph node. She could have prescribed a simple round of antibiotics ten days ago. The abscess would have cleared up, and my daughter would never have endured a week and a half of torture, a ruptured infection, and a brutal surgical procedure in the ER.

Instead, the APRN made a lazy assumption. She heard my daughter recently had a vaccine, latched onto that one piece of information, and sent an eighteen year old girl home to suffer.

I spent an hour on the phone this afternoon tracking down the administration office for that urgent care clinic. I filed a formal grievance against the APRN, and I fully intend to file a complaint with the state medical board as well. I want it on her permanent record that her refusal to actually examine a patient resulted in a severe, dangerous infection.

My daughter learned a very hard lesson today about blindly trusting authority figures. Just because someone wears a badge and a stethoscope does not mean they are doing their job correctly. From now on, if any doctor or nurse tries to diagnose either of us without actually looking at the physical problem, we are walking out and finding someone who will.