Hi missed the medieval grace
I just got back from the podiatrist.
About 2 weeks ago, my toe started to hurt. This Monday I stopped fooling myself and admitted I had an ingrown toenail, so I called and made an appointment with a podiatrist. That appointment was about an hour ago.
When I first met him, he didn’t even have to touch the offending toe to know what was wrong. He just took one look and said, “I’m going to numb this up and fix it.” This he did. After a series of painful injections, I was left to sit alone and watch my brown-painted toe as I could feel it slowly becoming less and less a part of my body. I overheard some interesting conversations — one phone call in which the doctor explained that yes, he did understand that the patient could still feel his toe, but no, it wasn’t growing back. There was also a discussion about some kind of “massive fungal growth”, but I (mercifully) wasn’t able to make most of that out.
The doctor came back into the room with me, tied a tourniquet around the base of the toe (which now felt like nothing more than a rock stuck to my foot) and proceeded to jab a metal tool directly into the tenderest part of my nail bed. It didn’t hurt, of course, but just the sight of it caused a number of expletives to find their way from out of my mouth. He chuckled and commented, “You probably don’t want to watch this.”. He was right. The rest of the procedure took place with my eyes closed, and consisted of some snipping sounds, then some scraping sounds, and finally some tearing sounds. All in all, it took about 30 seconds.
So now my toe is wrapped up in gauze to about the size of an egg (chicken), and it’s tingling like your foot does when it’s fallen asleep because you were sitting on the toilet for too long. Except that the toilet-foot-tingle isn’t usually accompanied by brief flashes of searing pain. I am not looking forward to this.
I read from a book while the doctor handled my ingrown toenail, holding it in front of my face so I didn’t accidentally think to look up and see what he was doing.
The post-procedure instructions weren’t bad, but they took some time for a week or so. All in all, not so fun, but better than before.
Ah! Ah! Ah! ehh Ah!
gah.
oh my goddddd
I had an ingrown toenail once. My dad spent an hour trying to get it out while I screamed and cried and thrashed on the floor. A week later, I popped it out of my skin on my own with the cap to my pen.
Apparently from the sounds of your story, I got lucky.
I had this happen when I was in high school. Doc fucked up though and left a sliver of the nail in my toe near the bone. It was big enough that my body couldn’t disintegrate it, and small enough that it didn’t show up on xrays. Had a second operation that also didn’t help any.
Suffered with it for like 10 years until that night we were at Dee’s and you unknowingly joked to Gary to not step on my magic toe. Gary, thinking it was funny said, “What, this one?” and proceeded to stomp on my foot as hard as he could. I saw god for a few seconds and then luckily felt my whole foot go knumb. Few more trips to the bar and I could almost see again.
Got home that night and it seems his stomp managed to cause that 10 year old splinter of nail to pierce the top of my toe. I yanked the 1/2″ long thing from my toe, poured rubbing alcohol into the gaping hole in my foot, and then chatted with god again for a few seconds. After that it healed up fine, and has been great since.
So hey, could be worse. =)
I had that done last year. Once the anaesthetic had worn off, it actually hurt more where the needle had gone in than where he’d dug the nail out.