If you take antibiotics and the staph goes away is that mrsa, or is that a relapse of the staph. If it is a relapse of the staph what would the procedure for this be
mrsa is methycillin-resistant staph aureaus. in other words, it's reistant to penicillin. mrsa is diagnosed by a culture in a petri dish. penicillin (pcn) is added to the culture and if the staph continues to grow, despite the the pcn, it is classified as mrsa.
a lot of times people stop taking their antibiotics before the course is done because they are "all better". if there are "lurking" bacteria, they may start to grow again. the problem is that these bacteria may mutate and become methycillin resistant because they were exposed to the antibiotic, but not long enough to kill them. nine times out of ten, thankfully, these bacteria do not become resistant, you just have a "relapse."
so to answer your question, if the antibiotics kill the staph, it is NOT mrsa.
if you have a relapse (the staph is sensitive to antibiotics-but it just came back), your doctor may take a culture of the infected area which takes about 48 hours to grow, he may continue your antibiotic (i suggest you take it ALL) or he may switch you to another antibiotic (which will be added to the culture to see if your staph is susceptible to it).
you may want to tell your doctor you are a grappler, because mrsa is becoming more prevalent is sports, not just grappling/wrestling.
david
definitely have them do a culture of the infection. i recently had MRSA, and told my doctor when i first went in that i had possibly been exposed to MRSA-i knew one guy from my school had it a couple weeks earlier.
i got treated immediately (there was redness around the "pimple", but no pus, oozing, or fever yet). two days after i started the antibiotics, there was a bunch of gross infection at the site, thick gross chunks of pus and blood in an open hole the size of a dime. soon after that, the culture results came back and he prescribed another antibiotic as well. it looked like they had tested the culture against 7-8 different antibiotics. the doctor was surprised that it was MRSA, since i had come in at a very early stage of the infection.
make sure to take your full dose of antibiotics, until the wound has healed before you consider yourself "non-contagious". you could spread the infection to other parts of your body or other people.
How long until you were back to normal, for instance no redness and trianing again
i caught mine very early, and it was just under 3 weeks to heal over. the infection/redness of the surrounding area was gone after about 2 weeks, and then it took about a week for the scab to heal over.