Good luck.
Roselee, your link did not go past my google home page.
Sammy

We really liked Molineux. I wish he were still posting.

Sammy

Sammy

I am leaning toward thornless rose, esp. for containers.
Burlington Rose Nursery in CA has a good selection of thornless roses and mini-roses. Large roses are $10.95 each, mini-roses are $7.50 each. The shipping cost is lowest. I ordered 5 large roses and 7 mini to be shipped to my Chicagoland, and the total price was only $133 including $25 shipping charge.

Burling has a good selection of mini roses, ranging from mini-floribunda (2' to 3' tall), or micro-mini (less than 1 feet).

Burling's fragrant and thornless roses (most are small for containers) are sold out quickly. Her website is under construction, but you can e-mail her for what's available. She has 160 mini-roses and 380 regular roses to choose from, many are thornless. Her email is: BurlingtonRoses@aol.com
Brad601 - I keep your wife in my prayers, please keep us up to date with her progress. Thanks.

I think the reason it only moved up the page for you is because that was an already archived post.

First, copy the address for the page you want to post and then paste it in the first box below the message box.

Then, go down to the second box below the message box and type in some words like "Old Swollen Hand post."

Then, click on the "preview message" box and you will see the link automatically generated by the GW system.

Now if you want to post a link within the message box, here is what you do.

Copy the address of the page you want to link to and past it inside the message box at this site.

Before that address, type in the following, but omit the extra spaces I had to insert to keep it from operating here (however, there is a space right after the first letter "a"): < a h r e f = "
At the end of that address, type in the following: ">
Next type in the words that will actually show on the page, such as "Old Swollen Hand post"-- (but no quote marks needed here)
Last, type in the following: < / a > (but don't include the extra spaces I had to put in there to keep the code from functioning)

It's much easier to use the boxes below this message box.

Hope that helps.

Wishing the best for you and your wife, Brad.

Kate

I'm a microbiologist, but I don't have a 'for sure' answer for you, just some observations to toss around with the docs (and btw, if you can get the CDC to 'stop by', you guys rock!)

- Toxin. I did the very same thing a few months ago. As a garden germ-o-phobe due to my profession, I got after it right away with mupiricin (bactroban). Hurt like a son of a gun a couple days later and was still swollen and somewhat red so I showed it to my boss when I got to work and who is an infectious disease physician. He didn't think it was infected and remarked that rose thorns and thorns in general also have a toxin and thought the residual swelling/pain was from that and it would gradually go away. Well, my boss is a nationally known ID doc, but mentally, I thought he was, to put it nicely, 'nuts', but *in my case* I think he was probably right and the problem was exacerbated by the fact that I think the thorn pricked the joint and thus inflamed the joint and that made the nerves in the joint terribly unhappy. Turned out, again in my case, that he was right and it gradually got better, although it did not help when I did the same thing on the same finger a week or so later - yes, I wear gloves religiously but had taken the glove off to tie up a cane. I hope your wife's problem is this simple, too.

- Second thing, if you don't have a really good infectious disease doc on her case, you should. Surgeons are great at what they do but ideally infection should not be their bally-wick if they do their primary jobs correctly.

- Sporotrichosis. *Generally* sporotrichosis and other fungal disease start more slowly than your wife's symptoms. Timing does not rule this diagnosis out, however, it seems less likely. You say they have ruled out common fungal diseases, how so? Sporotrichosis has an antibody test, which isn't very reliable, but in any case, I don't know that she'd have much of an antibody titer yet. Something for you to ask.
-- As for culture to rule out, cultures could be false negative if they didn't grind the tissue, OR if the infection is in the joint and they didn't culture the fluid.
--Not being an MD nor a psychic I can't be of more help, but if you look to the most simple cause for the problem and infection has been ruled out, I'd vote for the toxin causing a severe inflammation of the joint. I hope it's that simple.

Best to you both, keep us posted, ok?
Kerin

Peter Beales' website is excellent on rating the thorniess and the size of each rose. It searches for no thorns, low in thorns, etc.. and rates thorniess from the scale of 1 to 10. I found that Louis Odier is high, versus Jacques Cartier a 5 in thorn. Below is the link: