Ouch!

A few days ago, I went for a run but had to go back because the toe on my right foot started to hurt so much that I could barely walk. Well, sometimes it just happens that the run isn’t perfect, so I came home and decided to rest and go for another run the other day.

But the other day, the toe was hurting from the time I woke up and I almost couldn’t put any shoes on to go to work. I started to be a bit suspicious but just put on the most comfortable shoes I found and went to work. When I came home in the evening and I took off my shoes, the toe started to hurt quite a lot and so I checked it as I wanted to know if it had some bruises or scratches or what the hell was going on. But I found this:

It is not much visible on the picture but when I pressed the toe, between the skin and the nail appeared a little drop of some white-yellowish liquid. OMG, It scared me so much as I have never seen anything like that before!

I wasn’t sure what to do as I had no idea what was going on, so I started to google. I found out info that sometimes it can happen after pedicure when the cuticle was damaged a bit, and that it can be worse for people with diabetes. I wasn’t able to find any scratch or damage but I was on pedicure two days ago! They were suggesting putting the toe to a hot bath so the blood can circulate better and it should be easier to get rid of the pus.

I took a hot bath and removed some of the pus but soon after it was there again. I started to slightly panic and so I sent the picture to my practitioner and asked her what I should do. She called me almost immediately saying that it might be very serious for me considering the immunosuppression I was taking and also diabetes. So she told me to go to an emergency the following day and show it to them.

So I did. I waited almost two hours but when I saw the doctor that was supposed to treat me, all waiting was forgotten. He was tall, sporty looking, handsome and very nice to me. However, he was also very strict. So when he saw my toe, quite big and red at that time already, he told me that he had to remove part of the skin and the nail surgically. My first thought was “But I just had the nails done three days ago, it will look terrible!”. Ehm, yeah.

He told me that he needed to put local anesthesia and that he would put better two injections to be sure it was well covered. THAT was the most painful two injections in my entire life! The first one was to the side of the toe and the second directly to the middle of the cuticle. I put all my self-control into not kicking the doctor but my body started to shake and tears started to fall from my eyes. I’m quite used to enduring pain but this was really unbearable pain. I was even thinking that doing the surgery without the anesthesia would be less painful probably.

Anyway, the surgery itself went quite fast and then the doctor gave me some painkillers, some disinfection cream, told me how to treat the toe and told me to go home and rest. At that moment I realized that I came there in tights that I was’n able to put on now and in shoes that I couldn’t fit either. And it started to rain outside.

So I put on one shoe, the rest of the clothes to my handbag and went to the waiting room where I called my ex-husband if he could pick me up. I takes usually like 10-15 minutes to pick me up but this time it felt like 10 hours. I was shaking, I was freezing and I felt like crap. When I went outside to wait for him, I could see the people with question marks above their heads. They saw a woman with blurry makeup, in a skirt without tights with one shoe on and the other one in hand, standing at the entrance door while it was heavily raining outside.

When we finally arrived home, I just sat down, put my leg up and fell asleep. The following three days I was just treating my leg and resting and fortunately it went better quite fast.

So, what is the lesson learned from this? Because I am on immunosuppression and diabetes pills, I am more vulnerable to injuries like this and so whenever I go to manicure or pedicure, I have to tell them about it so they treat me more carefully. And use disinfection at the end of each procedure. I hope this helps someone to prevent such experience because for me it was a really, REALLY painful way how to find out.