Arctangential

Step 2: Make sure your chicken is well lubricated.

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 got some good stuff in the mail today:

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