Melinda Howard was breaking down cardboard boxes for recycling when one of them nicked her hand.
The 63-year-old Mississippi resident didn’t think much of the small paper cut at first.
“I was cramming a whole bunch of boxes, rolling them up and putting them into garbage bags, and one just caught my hand and gave me a paper cut, and I was like, ‘Oh, for crying out loud!’” she recalls.
Howard cleaned the cut, applied antibacterial ointment, and covered it with a bandage. She says her skin is especially sensitive after years of taking prednisone while living in Colorado. Prednisone can thin the skin and slow healing, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“I was on a lot of prednisone for several years, and the prednisone severely damaged my skin,” Howard says. “I’m 63, but my skin is really thin and I am a slow healer, so I knew that I would have to keep it covered well over a week.”
She kept the bandage on to avoid reopening the cut. “If I took it off too soon, I would just reopen the cut and we’d be starting from scratch,” she adds.
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A little over a week later, her hand started to hurt. Howard is a long-distance runner who logs 50 to 100 miles a week, so she’s used to dealing with minor aches — but this felt different.
The pain didn’t fade. When she finally removed the bandage, her hand was badly swollen and looked alarming. When her husband saw it, he immediately took her to urgent care.
Doctors treated her with an antibiotic shot, prescribed an antibiotic cream, and started her on oral antibiotics for the infection. They asked her to return a few days later to make sure the swelling and redness were improving.
While recovering, Howard posted a photo of her hand on X, and it quickly drew attention, topping 1.5 million views.
“People have been asking me how my hand is doing? I think it’s doing better? The pic on the left is from Friday. Pic on the right is from today (Monday). I’ll let you decide ☺️,” she wrote.
Since then, she says her hand has steadily improved.
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“The swelling is pretty much gone. It is red, and the scabs are gone. The redness is much better than it was,” she says. “It’s kind of muted, and my rings spin on my fingers again. That makes me very happy. It was a tiny paper cut, but my hand just decided that it would overreact.”
Her doctors haven’t given her an exact recovery timeline yet, but Howard is hopeful she’ll be fully back to normal soon.
