Another 10 days of pain has gone by with no improvement. Yesterday was one of the worst yet. Ugh. After some advice from my aunt who has Rhuematoid Arthritis I went to my general practitioner. We took a new blood sample and the results showed yet again some potential for a strep infection. The initial synovial fluid sample on 10/26 showed a very high streptozyme count (386 when 200 is considered high). Liz and I mentioned this to the arthritis dr and he said it was nothing. That was a test of fluid from my knee. The new sample was blood which doesn’t show strep bacteria count, but instead shows strep antibodies called Antistreptolysin. This also gets flagged as high if the count is greater than 200. MINE WAS 10379.5!!! INSANE! So my GP prescribed me Amoxicillin. I started it yesterday evening. The above photo was taken before I went to sleep as both ankles had swollen up worse that they have yet. They weren’t super painful. Anyways I woke up this morning feeling better. I got out of bed before taking a painkiller for the first time in awhile. I’ve had a few ups and downs so it’s to early to say if the Amoxicillin is doing the trick, but I’m not complaining. At least it makes perfect sense to me to be taking it when the lab results show there is a good chance I have a strep infection.