Something’s Afoot

So about six weeks ago I stepped on something in our laundry room/pantry. I thought it was a grain of cat litter and kept trying to brush it off my foot but it wouldn’t come off.

It wouldn’t come off because it turned out to be a piece of glass stuck in the bottom of my precious beautiful foot and now you get to hear the saga of what fun I’ve been having hosting this complete parasite for weeks.

A few hours after the usurper stabbed itself into my poor unsuspecting hoof I finally gave up on the idea that it was a mere crumb of litter and sat down to examine it more closely. After some painful attempts to extract whatever it was I asked The Lovely Rhonda to help and between us we managed to get what appeared to be a piece of glass out. I would have rejoiced but oh man did it hurt.

The evil bit of beer bottle (or whatever it was) glinted malevolently at me, but I just scoffed and threw it in the trash. Little was I to know the tribulations I would face at the remaining hands — shards? — of this little bastard, lo these several weeks hence.

A few days later I noticed that my foot hurt, not excruciatingly but more like irritatingly, every time I walked. Which, you know, is like every single day. This went on for a bit and then I realized that we were about to leave on the Epic Family Vacation to the East Coast and maybe I should get it looked at by a professional, since it was still bugging me and we were going to be traipsing all over four major cities for close to a month.

I went to an urgent care and a smug, restless MD in crisp scrubs sent me for x-rays. He didn’t see any glass in my foot, told me it was inflammation, and advised me to wear cushy shoes and take ibuprofen.

I can do neither of these things. I have to wear hard plastic orthotics in my shoes just to walk upright, and I can’t take NSAIDS because I have a tiny delicate remodeled stomach. So yeah, thanks for that, Doctor McUseless.

We went on the glorious vacation and dutifully traipsed through all the major sights of the aforementioned four major cities, and each day I put a bandaid over the supposedly inflamed area of my foot and just got on with it. We covered 4-6 miles of walking a day, which for a Traditionally Built woman such as myself, with the flat feet and the arthritis and the missing hamstring etc was a significant amount of trudging.

We returned from this epic journey a couple of days ago, and I was too busy starting a new clinical instructor gig to even think about having the foot examined again, but finally today I couldn’t take it any longer and managed to get a same-day appointment at my usual doctor’s office. My provider wasn’t in but I saw a delightful MD there who was willing to give this thing a try.

For an appetizer we started off with a piquant injection of lidocaine directly into my foot. It sucked and I said some Interesting Things right out loud, which did not seem to alarm the good doctor. I imagine that if your job is to occasionally jab people with pointy objects and get paid handsomely to do so, you get used to the occasional bit of salty language.

Next we moved on to the salad course, which involved a scalpel carving into my poor unsuspecting foot-meats. Which were insensate, and it’s a good thing. Because then came the main course of using tweezers to fish around inside my foot in search of stray bits of glass. At least two were extracted. It was difficult to tell how many were removed because a) they were tiny pieces and b) there was blood. So much blood. And c) the glass was brownish and difficult to see in all that blood.

Did I mention I was bleeding my own actual blood during this part? Because I totally was.

We wrapped up this romantic occasion with irrigating the gaping hole copiously with saline in hopes of flushing out any further hangers-on. It really makes the whole event to have a syringe jammed into a cunning new entrance into your foot’s interior spaces. Just adds a certain je ne sais quois.

The tech applied a sassy little bandage to the terrorized appendage and off I went, having been instructed to not bear weight on that foot for a few days and soak the wound four times a day in salt water “to keep it open.”

EW EW EW

If this doesn’t work I get to visit with Mr Surgeon for a more in-depth plumb of the depths of my foot.