Leg Injury Comes Back To Haunt

A couple of days ago, I woke up to find my left leg incredibly swelled and red, with mild pain.  It seems the pocket of liquid (that I have lived with for almost 2 years) was getting fuller as well! It seems to be related to the car collision I was involved with back in 2006.  A little background, after “healing” from that incident, a pocket of liquid remained in front of my Tibia (shinbone) below the knee. After about 9 months of no change (no pain, no increase or decrease of fluid, just annoyance of being there), I went to see a doctor and then a leg and angle specialist.  The specialist told me I probably didn’t need to worry about it and that we could drain the fluid now - there would be a chance that the liquid would come back after a while.  If it did, I shouldn’t worry.  Well, it did a few days/weeks later - again, no pain, etc. Fast-forward to a few days ago when I woke up to this mess: I went to the emergency room at Beijing United Family Hospital to get this looked at. (The pic above is of what it looked like yesterday (Tuesday) in the emergency room after the Doctor drew a hashed line around the redness (infection) and solid line around the pocket of fluid (that was much bigger than usual). Diagnosis as of yesterday: pretty advanced infection. I was put on a every 8-hour penicillin IV to work on the infection (as of this point, I already had 4 doses.) I went to the doctor again today (this time to see the chief of surgery).  The redness did retreat a bit from yesterday (after 3 dosses of IV penicillin).  The doctor recommended 6 more doses (spread over the next 3 days, one in morning 7am, one in afternoon, 3pm) and oral penicillin in the evenings before bed. I asked the surgeon about draining the fluid as I feld it was stretching the skin, causing most of the pain.  He said that wouldn’t be a good idea as by poking a hole through the infected layer with a needle into the fluid sack would cause the fluid to become infected, which would make the situation much worse and more complicated.  So we agreed to wait until the infection was taken care of by the penicillin before we discuss next options. Lucky me.