MY TOE.

4 August 2022

i'll start with the disclaimer that many news programs give when they are about to air a particularly gruesome bit of news.  If you are grossed out by body problems, you might want to skip this entry.

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I wear socks all the time, 24/7.  For most of my life I always went barefoot and hated to have to wear shoes.  After I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, I read that you should never go barefoot and since that time I wear socks all the time, preferably loose fluffy ones that I pick up at the Dollar store.

I wear socks at night too and sometimes in the night a long-ish toenail might get caught in the fibers of the socks and when I move around, it hurts because it's caught in the thread.  Now the easiest thing to do when something like that happens is to remove the sock and reposition the toes and go back to sleep, but nooooo.  I suffer.

So the other night I was having a particularly difficult time sleeping because my left foot hurt so much and I figured that I had a long toenail that needed to be trimmed, but I didn't do anything about it for the next day.  It's difficult for me to reach my toes and Ned has been trimming the nails for me and I didn't want to bother him.

And so I hobbled around the house and when we went to meet Bubbles, it hurt to walk from the car up the driveway to the house.

When I went to take my shower, I took off my sock and my big toenail was standing straight up, perpendicular to the toe itself and it was obviously infected.

We called Kaiser and they could get me an appointment with my doctor the next day.  I didn't sleep under my weighted blanket because I didn't want the toenail to rub on anything, so I just had a few layers of blanket covering my upper half and that worked pretty much as well as the weighted blanket does.

I took video of the "surgery" to remove the toenail for Ned and Walt, who weren't able to come to the appointment with me, but I only have the one actual photograph, which was after the nail was removed.

The doctor says the toenail will not grow back, so I guess no fancy pedicures for me in the future! (Not that I ever had one before either!)

I am so very grateful that Marta was able to be with me.  Like Ned, she knows all the things to ask and remembers what the doctor says, which I often don't.  Also, my doctor is from Bangladesh and has a very thick accent, which I've always had difficulty understanding.

She got the toe all cleaned and dressed and bandaged.  I am fortunate that I wear Birkenstocks, which are very easy to fit a bandaged toe into.

I have to soak it once a day in water and apple cider vinegar for two weeks, keep it bandaged (we've graduated to a large bandaid not the bandage you see here) and I am taking an antibiotic for the infection.  I will have a follow-up video conference with my doctor in two weeks.

So I may not have tested positive for COVID but I've managed to have my own little doctor emergency anyway.