h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I had the same condition about two months ago. I know how painful it is. And I know about the injections... And the pilla... And the annoying patients in the same (or adjacent) wards.

Mine started on a monday night (I probably got a cut or soemthing at football practice on the sunday, but I can't say for sure) when I felt an itch on my lower leg. I couldn't sleep that well that night, and the following day I had a splitting headache, which kept me home from work. At the same time, my leg started to turn red and very warm.
Equipped with painkillers, I went back to work on the wednesday, but by now I had started having troubles waklking because of the inflammation in the leg, so I called my GP and asked to get an appointment. The earliest available appointment was on the friday, and at that time, I thought I could soldier it out until then, but after I got home from work, the pain had become worse and I was beginning to feel that I had a fever.

By this time, I decided that seeing a doctor straight away might be a good idea, so I askde my then flat-mate to give me a lift to the hospital, where I was sat in the waiting room at the A&E for about 45 minutes before being taken to an examining room by a nurse, who did an initial check on my leg so as to be able to report this to the doctor.

After a wait of about ten or fifteem minutes, a doctor came in and had a look at my leg, told me it was cellulitis and that it was treatable with antibiotics, so he got me two packs of lots of pills to take 4 timnes a day for a week. He also got a magic marker and drew a line around the inflammed part of my leg and told me that if the swelling grew any bigger, I should come back immediately. Then he sent me home.

The next day, I decided that since I'd got the pills from the doc, I was on my way to get better again, so I went to work again, limping severely due to the pain in the leg. My Team Leaders at work asked me what was wrong, so I showed them, and they told me that I should go back to the hospital, which I had already decided to do. After work.

After work, I went home, lay down for a while to relieve the pain a bit, fell aslep and didn't wake up until later that night. Pain still there, and the inflammed area of my leg looking like it was about to groqw even more, I decided to go to the hospital. This time, it took about fifteen minutes in the waiting room, and about the same before a doctor came to have a look at the leg for me. After a look at the leg, he went off to find me a bed in a ward, and I had to wait another 30 minutes before I was told where I was going to go. They also brought me a wheelchair so that they could take me up there, but since I'd been walking on the leg for two days, I thought I could walk up to the ward on it as well. So I took my papers they had given me and went up to the ward. By now, the time was about 9:30pm, Thursday night.

I had to wait until about midnight before they came and gave me my first injection of antibiotics and after that, I got those injections four times a day for the next five days that I spent at the hospital.

The stay at the hospital wasn't really that bad, except for one of the other patients in the ward who seemed to have ants in his pants. He couldn't stay still for five seconds, and that included during night time. Fortunately, he didn't make much fuss and he didn't shout or yell or anything like that, it was just his constant running up and down from his bed to the smoking room to somewhere else that was a bit annoying.

The following Tuesday, the swelling of my leg had subsided and it was not longer as red and warm to the touch, so they gave me some more bottles of antibiotics (enough to last me a week) and sent me home, telling me to come back on the Thursday for a check on the progress. When I got there on the Thursday, the doctor told me it looked as if the swelling was going down even more, and the inflammation looked to be almost gone, but he told me to come back after a week just to have a look at it again.
It's now almost two months after and although I have no major symptoms left, I feel that if I get a cut or a lesion on that leg, it takes forever for it to heal properly. But other than that, I'm fine.

A rather lengthy post here, but since we're talking about Cellulitis and personal accounts, I thought I'd share.

Disappointed you managed to miss out on the painful vomitting there Lost In Scotland .

Good news is that there doesn't seem to be any long-term worries - no difference between either leg anymore as far as healing goes (though the left one still has a bit of a bump and goes slightly redder when I've been running about).

Well, I did occupy myself with some early morning vomiting from which I barely got up off the floor, since i couldn't put any weight on my leg, but that was just once and it was mostly water, cause I hadn't eaten anything for about two days, but it was such a minor incident that I must have forgotten it in my little story.

I haven't noticed any tendency for the leg to get redder than the other one when exercising, though.