You've probably heard about antibiotic resistance. You know, infections that fail to clear up even though you've taken all of your antibiotics. The medical term for this condition is MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA has been around for years -- in fact, MRSA has been the leading cause of hospital deaths. That's the hospital-aquired (HA) type of MRSA or HA-MRSA. But MRSA is no longer confined to hospital patients, it's showing up in the community in people who have not been hospitalized. This type of MRSA is known as community-acquired MRSA or CA-MRSA.

Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacteria that often lives on the skin, and sometimes in the nasal passages, of perfectly healthy people. Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, often shows up in skin infections such as boils and pimples, and more and more often is not healing after a round of traditional antibiotics. This is where MRSA comes in -- when traditional antibiotics such as penicillin-type drugs fail to cure skin infections, as well as other more serious types of infection that can affect the heart, blood, lungs, and bones.

Staph infections of the skin frequently present as red, swollen, and very painful boils on the skin. There may be pus draining from the infection and a fever is often present. Of course, I'd heard of MRSA, but I didn't worry too much about it until a few weeks ago, when a very painful boil popped up on my back in a matter of minutes one evening while I waited for my son to fix his first flat tire. I wasn't sure what was causing the pain -- maybe it was a suddenly painful pulled muscle. Once my son and I got home, he looked at my back and said it was an abscess, which I begged (because, as a medical assistant he knew better) him to "pop." He finally gave in to me, but that didn't really stop the pain or make it better.

Finally, two days later, I called my doctor (who actually often answers his own phone) and he told me to come right in. One look at my back and he knew what it was  and prescribed the treatment for MRSA -- a combination of three antibiotics. Wow, those antibiotics made me feel horrible, but I took them until they were gone and returned to the doctor for my follow up appointment. It was only after I had finished the antibiotics and been back to the doctor that I finally looked up the antibiotics I had taken -- I'd taken two of them before, but had never heard of one. I wondered about the antibiotics, at that point, because over twenty-four hours since I'd finished the medication I experienced the most incredible night sweats ever -- in spite of having a hysterectomy over 10 years ago. As I read the possible drug interactions for the new antibiotic, I saw that it said it could interfere with "female hormones, including birth control pills." It definitely interfered with my hormones, as bad as the sweats were I wouldn't have been surprised to have drowned in my bed. Now I have the deepest empathy for women who experience sweats on a regular basis, or as a result of using medications such as Lupron.

I've learned a lot about MRSA in the last few weeks, especially about how to prevent MRSA. Today, I go back to the doctor, and although the area on my back is still red, I think it's healing.

When MRSA Hits Home originally appeared on About.com Women's Health on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:10:09.

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