ATLANTA -- When Wilmer Flores arrived at Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery on April 20, he said, his knee had become so infected that doctors were considering surgery. By the next morning, things had healed well enough for Flores to avoid the worst. But he still required a four-day stay at the hospital, where Flores received a regular IV drip of antibiotics.
The culprit, as it turns out, was a staph infection in Flores' right knee. The Mets activated him from the disabled list on Wednesday, optioning reliever Sean Gilmartin to Triple-A Las Vegas in a corresponding move.
"Right now, everything's normal," Flores said. "I don't feel anything. I don't feel what I was feeling when I had it. It was something I had no control over. I had no idea how it happened."
When Flores first began feeling knee discomfort, he said, the infection manifested itself as a small red mark that looked like a mosquito bite. At its worst, the infection caused discomfort in much of his leg, from his entire knee to his hip.
"It just got bigger and bigger," Flores said. "It wasn't like a muscle pain. It was just like, whenever I was seated, I was having a tough time getting up again. Thank God it's gone."
Before his DL stint, Flores was batting .171 with two home runs and a .537 OPS in 12 games, doing most of his damage -- as usual -- vs. left-handed pitching. Against lefties, Flores was hitting .385/.429/.846, including both of his home runs.

Though Flores was not in the Mets' lineup Wednesday, with T.J. Rivera starting a sixth consecutive game at first base, he was available off the bench. The Mets did not originally plan to activate Flores so soon, but when catcher Travis d'Arnaud suffered a relapse of his bruised right hand in Tuesday's loss to the Braves, the Mets opted to activate Flores rather than risk playing with a three-man bench.
The team does not consider d'Arnaud's injury serious; he is day to day.