My Left Foot
If you thought 970 words on contact lens placement was entertaining and informative, here’s another 960 on my left big toenail. I wrote this a few weeks ago after my first visit to a podiatrist, but didn’t get around to posting it until now.
I whacked my big toe at some point during the winter, and it still hasn't healed properly. What happened was the skin along the side of my left big toe nail sort of separated from the nail. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it will bleed a little bit, sometimes it looks infected, but until lately it hasn’t really been anything that I worried too much about. I mean, the last time anybody died from ingrown toenail had to have been the Civil War. One of the things I've learned since my accident is that I heal a lot slower now than I used to, so I've just been expecting my toe to take a longtime to heal. Lately, however, I've noticed that the skin that should be along side of the toenail is trying to grow over the toenail. So I decided that I had some time this week to make an appointment with a podiatrist.
The first thing to discover about making an appointment with podiatrist is that they must be very low in the hierarchy of medical professionals. If you open up the Yellow Pages, and go to the blue section where all the physicians’ names and numbers are listed, you won't find any listings for podiatrists. Podiatrists are listed outside of that section, and the more I think about podiatry, it kind of makes sense. I can't think of any minor foot problems that there aren't over-the-counter remedies for, and if it's a problem like a broken toe or foot people usually go to their regular doctors for that sort of thing. I’m imagining the world of podiatric medicine as a place where not much changes, to the extent that the annual International Conference of Podiatric Doctors probably takes place every two years. All the breakout sessions at the conference usually just disintegrate into bitch-fests about how they can get back at that “turncoat” Dr. Scholls, with his dizzying array of powders, shoe inserts, and mole skin.
I ended up making an appointment with a podiatrist primarily based on the proximity of his office to my apartment, because ultimately I think that’s what is important when finding the proper podiatrist. My other selection criteria, was that this doctor actually had an advertisement in the Yellow Pages not just a listing. I figure that on the extremes you will either get the podiatrist who is well aware of podiatry’s second-class citizenship in the world of medicine and is out to change that standing, or the podiatrist who went podiatry school because podiatrists still get to be called doctor and still get to be paid somewhat like a real doctor. These types of podiatrist are on par with the proctologist that chooses to go with vanity license plate “ASSMAN.” The rest of the world's podiatrists, fall somewhere in between those two extremes.
I'm happy to report that my podiatrist is more likely to get grouped with that second group. I need a little entertainment mixed in with my life-threatening medical experiences every now and then. One thing that keeps him from being completely lumped into that second group is the fact that he’ll make house calls. So when I arrived at my appointment and he wasn't actually there I thought to myself, “Must be a making a house call.” No, he pulled up shortly thereafter, in a late-model BMW, which I learned that he was test driving for his wife. "My wife wants to buy that BMW. We have five Weimaraners; they'll destroy the inside of that car."
When the doctor inspected my toe he explained that he was going to have to trim the loose skin away from the nail for it to heal properly. What he didn’t explain was that this also meant cutting away a portion of my toenail all the way to the cuticle and then pulling it out. Judging by the way my toe started twitching around, this was causing a great deal of pain. Luckily for me, I couldn’t feel it at all. The narration I was getting from my podiatrist as this was going on went something like this, “Look at that sucker gush blood,” and “This one’s just going to want to bleed.” When he went to pack a piece of cotton ball into my wound to stop up the bleeding, my toe would twitch as he touched it, his quote was “luckily I’m pretty good at hitting a moving target.” On referring to his tools and work space after bandaging up my toe, he said, “let me clean that bloody mess out of your way.”
When I went back a few days later for my follow-up visit to get the bandaging taken off my podiatrist assured me that he couldn’t guarantee that the nail and skin would grow back properly. However, it was going to take so long for that the nail to grow back that I didn’t need to worry about it right now. This is perfect for me because that’s exactly how I ended up there in the first place. So, as long as I have my doctor’s professional opinion backing me up, I’m going to say that my toe worries are over for now.
