I Had My Toenail Cut To Bits!

If you follow my facebook page for my blog, you would have seen the wonderful image of the giant wrap I had on my toe after I had the doctors remove most of my toenail. Well, if you haven’t seen the picture yet, here it is.

Now you might be wondering, howd it go? Was it painful? How was recovery? Anything you can say for those who are about to go through the same procedure? Give me just a minute and I will explain everything.

So let me share some back story for those who don’t know me well enough to know everything about my toes. I have thumb-like big toes. They are pudgy and round, and most the time, red and swollen. I used to think that the red and swollen aspect was a normal thing for feet, as that was how things have always been with my toes since I can remember (its not). So anyway, I get ingrown toenails frequently. Im talking like one every couple months or so, at least 3-4 times a year. Usually, when I get them, I soak the toe, use some hydrogen peroxide, and smother the thing in Neosporin. Typically that procedure works and the infection is gone in about 3 days to a week.

Well rewind back to December 10th ish. I get an ingrown on both big toes, left and right. I start doing my normal routine and the right toe gets better in just a couple days. As for the left, that toe decides that it is going to be as stubborn as can be, and not leave. So December 21st comes along and I go to the ER because my toe is now extremely infected, I can barely walk on it, and its almost purple (oops…). They tell me the toenail has to come off, however they cant do it and I have to go to the podiatrist the next day.

I call that morning, doc gets me in that afternoon, and we start the procedure. He looks at my toe and kind of shamed me with the fact that I hadn’t come in sooner, but was glad I was there when I was. So how did the procedure go? Well, first he reclined me in this procedure chair, and had me angled just right where I couldn’t see my toe without lifting my head up a ways. The nurse then came in and said that she was going to numb the couple of spots on my toe where they will be inserting the numbing needle (which is huge by the way). They wanted to make sure that I couldn’t feel the needle going into my foot. Once she made sure I couldn’t feel anything in the injection sites, she grabbed out the numbing agent and her Nurse Ratched-esque needle.

To be honest, I didn’t feel much, at least during this portion of the whole thing. She would numb a bit here, then stick the needle in the other side and numb some over there, and repeat. She would then take a scissors and poke me with the pokey end and asked if I could feel it. The left side (or exterior) of my toe (which I should say, I have never had a hang nail on), was numb right away and I couldn’t feel a thing. The right side (or interior), which was really infected, took forever to numb and I could feel her jabbing me with the shears. We repeated the numbing shots several times on my interior portion of my toe, because, as she kept reminding me, “you really don’t want to feel what the doctor is going to do to your toe”. That’s such a positive note to think while you cant see your toes and youre not too sure what really is going to happen to you.

What actually does happen with your toe? So in my scenario, my toenail grew sideways into the sides of my toes. That’s what caused the swelling and the constant ingrowns. The doctor goes in and cuts away the sides of the toenail, and basically pulls out the portion that has been growing sideways. Then, to help prevent the nail from repeating the whole “growing the wrong way” thing, he then puts in some acid into the nail base which kills the nail and stops it from being stupid. (Hope I put that into easy enough English for everyone.)

After everything was all numb, the doctor came back in. he checked out my toe, made sure I couldn’t feel a thing, and started the whole procedure. I didn’t feel much, especially when he did the exterior of my toe. Just a lot of pulling, and maybe a little discomfort. He pulled out the exterior side and said, “yeah, that might cause a little bit of pain, its kinda big.” And set the toenail chunk to the side. Then he started working on the interior side of my toe. Now, as I said, that side of my toe was very infected. I was kind of scared what was going to happen once he removed that side. Well he got to cutting, and I had a knee-jerk reaction and pulled my foot back a bit. Doc looked at me and asked if I could feel what he was doing. Yep. Definitely could. We put the procedure on pause to bring the nurse back in to numb me up more.

10 minutes later, the doctor comes back in and starts the slicing and dicing again. Couldn’t feel a thing this time. He pulls out the side of the toe nail and all I hear is: “wow.” That’s not a thing that you want to hear when you cant see whats going on. He told me that he completely understood now why I was constantly getting ingrown toenails and infections and can understand why it might hurt. He set the other portion of the toenail aside and made sure to let me know that he was planning on showing them to me after all was said and done.

So now the toenail is removed. Now what? He took what looked like chop sticks and dipped them into some sort of acid. He then took the sticks and jabbed them into the sides of my toenail, where the other portions used to be. He left them in for about 10 seconds, took them out, then repeated a few times. Then he rinsed them with a base to neutralize the area, dried my toe and wrapped it up to make it look like a club.

Heres the fun part that might freak a few people out. He grabbed the chunks of toenail that he yanked from my toe and showed them to me. The exterior part was maybe a couple millimeters or so, big, but not huge or anything. The other side was at least a centimeter. For those who need to have a visual of how big that is, take a pencil, and its width is just below a centimeter. That’s how deep my toenail went into the side of my toe.

Now as far as my recovery goes, that was a bumpy ride. The toe healing part, that went perfectly fine. However, I was put on a wonderful antibiotic by my wonderful ER doctor, a sulfa- drug, and turns out I am pretty allergic to it. Ended up in the ER again on December 28th. But like I said, outside of that, the healing of my toe itself, went very smooth. I had to soak it for 15 minutes every morning and shower every night, making sure to wash it with antibacterial soap. Then I had to make sure to put a bandaid with some Neosporin and wrap it up.

My pain level was lower, definitely hurt less than when the toe was infected. I could actually walk on it! However, I couldn’t wear my cute winter boots with a heel because that put way too much pressure on it, and I couldn’t stand for too long, as it would start to ache a little. Mainly, the pain was more of a discomfort than anything. I couldn’t run either until the pain stopped, and when it did, I was so afraid to put too much pressure on my toe, so I lifted just the big toe for the 1 mile I did. This caused a giant blister to form on the top of my toe. Oops.

How is it now? Absolutely wonderful. I am so glad I went through with the procedure and cant wait to have my other foot done. However, I have come across a couple things that are still odd to me. First of all, I now realize the constant throbbing pain I had in my toe prior to doing the procedure, is not a normal pain. I have it still in my other foot, and im realizing that it shouldn’t be there. Second, without my toenail digging into the sides of my toe, I have this feeling in my toe that my toenail is not secured to my foot any longer and could fall off if I hit it wrong. I know this is in my head, but im just not used to not having the anchored feeling any more. But like I said, I am so glad I had the procedure and the pain is gone.

Toe on Left: My right foot, it has not had a procedure done (note the swollen,  puffy edges around my toe)
Toe on Right: Toe that had the procedure done. Still a little puffy, but nowhere near as puffy or swollen. You can actually see the sides of my toenail if you look close enough. 

So, if you are someone like me and have issues like ingrown toenails and such, and someone recommends to go get your toenail removed, I would 100% look into it. It can give you so much relief of pain and discomfort. You really dont know what youre missing until you get this done, and as scary and disgusting as it might sound, it can alleviate so many issues. 

Below are some pictures of during the healing process. If you are not a fan of cuts or toes or anything that might have to do with blood or stuff along the lines of that, I would advise to exit out of this blog now. 

For those who are still with me, here are those images I was talking about! 

Day 1 after removing bandage

I had to leave my bandage on for an entire day after the procedure, then soak it. I took this image after my first soaking. If you look at the bottom corners of my nail bed, you can see almost what looks like 2 rounded edges that kinda look like they are oozing a bit. That is where the doctor shoved the acid into, post procedure. You can also see how infected my toe still was. Notice how the right side of the toe is still pretty purple. Also, what looks like a freckle at the base of my toe is one of the injection spots for the numbing agent. 

Day 2

So after the first day, I started to get into the routine of soaking the toe in the morning and cleaning the toe at night. My toe definitely looked much more disgusting after the second day, but much of the swelling went down from the infection. My toe started to ooze a lot more, and if I remember right, I was on my feet a lot more than the previous day. That might be a reason why this day looks like the toe was getting worse. 

Day 4

On day 4, the toe started to look a lot better. Swelling was almost gone, and the oozing had decreased dramatically. My toe stayed in this condition for almost a week. You can notice that the lower corners of my nail bed is turning darker. This is one thing that did freak me out a little bit, as I started to develop black circles where the doctor inserted the acid. The circles turned into scabs eventually and just fell off. I no longer have these marks. I didnt take any pictures after day 4, as the next day, I was in the ER, and getting better after that allergic reaction was my main priority.