No "Happy Feet" for e

I vaguely remember banging my right foot against something a few weeks ago. I am extremely clumsy, so I am always getting bruised and battered and really can't keep straight which body part I hit against what at any given time. But I did notice that my toenail on my big toe seemed to have stopped growing recently. And when I went to change my nail polish, the nail looked yellowish. And then a few days ago, a huge red bump started forming at the base of that same toe's cuticle. What was going on?

All I could figure is that I must have banged my foot against something that caused my toenail to get jammed back into my skin, because it now looked sunken and shortened. I asked my husband to look at my feet and tell me what he thought, and he didn't see the red bump I was talking about. Now, why I didn't keep in mind that he is basically blind, I'm not sure, but perhaps I just wanted to keep believing that everything was OK.

Well, yesterday when I went to have my massage, I told the masseuse to stay away from that toe because of the bump. She looked at it for about two seconds before remarking, "Wow, you really need to see a doctor about that." "Yeah," I replied nonchalantly, "I was thinking of calling the doctor tomorrow." "You really better," she repeated, sounding quite concerned.

I put my funky toe problem out of my mind during the massage (though was conscious of the fact that the masseuse stayed FAR AWAY from that area...), but I was quickly reminded of it when I got on the bus to return home. I kid you not, a woman boarded the bus a few stops after me wearing sandals that exposed that she had NO BIG TOES. I could not believe it. It was like on that one Seinfeld episode where there's a painting of Kramer that someone describes as "a loathsome, offensive brute, yet I cannot look away." I could not stop myself from continuing to try and peek at this woman's feet. I was horrified, yet captivated.

After a half-hour or so passed, the woman got off the bus. I had been sitting slightly behind her, so she did not see me trying to examine her toes the entire ride. What I concluded was that she either 1) had some sort of deformity, 2) had to get some of her toes amputated because of frostbite (I had determined that she was a mountain-climber, not sure why, but I felt sure of this), or 3) had also banged her feet (simultaneously, I guess?) against something, ignored the resulting infections, and THEN had to get her toes amputated because of her laziness. I was sure this woman being on my same bus was "a sign" directly from the universe to me. She had paraded her missing toes in front of me for the sole purpose of motivating me to save my own "little piggies," as my mom used to call them.

Last night I proceeded to have all sorts of nightmares about having to get my toenail removed (the thought of which makes me swoon) as well as getting my toes, feet, and even my legs chopped off. When I woke up at 2 am because there was a huge storm and I feared my basement might be flooded again, I was sure that I felt pangs of pain emanating from my toe up my entire leg. Oh Lord, I was going to lose the lower half of my body, no doubt about it.

Needless to say, I called my doctor's office the second they opened today. I got an appointment at 11:15 and was sitting there in the waiting room 20 minutes early.

My doctor informed me that I had a "nail bed infection" (she called it by some fancy name as well) most likely caused by banging my toe into something that resulted in my toenail jamming back into my skin. Strangely enough, I was prescribed Cipro, which anyone who's traveled to a third-world country is probably intimately familiar with (I'll leave it at that). I'm supposed to take it for ten days and call her if the red bump hasn't gone down in 4 days. There was absolutely no mention of amputation.

Now that I'm not going into an office, there are very few people who have to bear witness to my gross toe. My dog doesn't seem to care about it, and my husband could apparently never even see it in the first place. So unfortunately the only people who are now disgusted by this are you, my dear readers. What can I say, I need to keep it real!

- e