Wow, I haven't been on here since I started this thread I'm pretty surprised to see the discussion still going on now. Couple things I'd like to say.
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their input and concern over my wellbeing, I was genuinely terrified at the time. I had my phone in the other hand with 00 punched in and decided to post here instead incase it wasn't quite as serious as it may have seemed. In the end it wasn't.
The reason I was reluctant to seek medical attention was entirely due to previous mistreatment by hospital staff after other complications. One of the most insulting occurred in my early 20s when I was relatively new to using opiates IV. I was unaware that injecting suboxone with other opiates in your system that it would lead to precipitated withdrawl. I had injected 40mg of oxycodone a few hours earlier and decided to inject suboxone. Needless to say it was a terrible mistake and lead to some very unpleasant complications, one of which was a lot of vomitting. It became immediately apparent that something was very wrong but it was a long way to hospital. After some time of vomitting nothing but stomach acid, I vomitted something that looked like a small uncooked piece of meat. At this point I decided I had no choice but to seek medical attention, dragged myself to a train station, got on a train and dragged myself to hospital. It was awful.... Upon arriving I told the triage nurse what had happened. "What's suboxone?" was her reply. I explained and she told me that it was not an emergency because I was only vomitting and had really bad diarrhea (probably spelt wrong) and told me to go to the 24 hour doctor accross the road. I went there and there was about 16 people in the waiting room. I vomitted everywhere and shat my pants. A doctor came out and told me I needed to go to hospital. I walked back to the hospital where the triage nurse told me "I already told you to leave and now I'm calling security". I yelled out for another nurse or a superior and started causing a little bit of a scene, understandably. I didn't want any trouble, I just wanted some medical attention. I had no idea why this was happening to me. Another nurse came out and asked what was going on. I told her and she immediately got me in a bed, gave me some valium and a saline drip. I fell asleep eventually, and when I awoke they gave me a sandwich to see if I could tolerate food. I kept it down fine and felt a lot better, and left.
Another time I went there after punching a brick wall and dislocating one of my knuckles. I was in a decent amount of pain and asked for some painkillers. They gave me 2 panadeine forte. I told them I use 2 - 3 points of heroin a day and that panadeine forte would do nothing. They told me they wouldnt give me anything else. I kept asking and was escorted out by security. Naturally, I went and got on and felt better. Hand healed itself eventually.
As for what happened with the weird swelling, I tend to believe that it was due to the tip of the needle going slightly but not fully into the vein, enough to drawback blood but not completely in there. Heroin is a histamine agonist, and having it enter my system partially subcutaneously was likely the cause of the swelling. Thats just my opinion though and I'm not a doctor or anything.
For what it's worth I've been off heroin for over a year now, after a series of unpleasant relapses such as the one this thread is about. I dropped the next time I used. I love heroin as much as the next person and I'm sure I always will, but that dark chapter of my life is over now. I have a nice girlfriend, a nice place to live, a bit of work and things are great.
Sorry to get off topic like that but yeh just throwing my 2 cents in.
Thanks.