Healthbolt

Designer Toes and Your Blogger’s $522 Blister (Lidocaine and Lancing, Oh Boy!)

by Sara Ost on November 1st, 2007

It’s a toe triumvirate today, you poor souls:

First, in an unusual twist, surgeons replaced a man’s missing thumb with his big toe. The man lost his thumb in April and surgeons reattached it, but it just didn’t feel right. Since the man is a cabinet maker by trade, he needs a working thumb, so it was off with the toe this week! Toe-on-thumb action is actually not a new procedure. Here are the graphic pictures.

Second, cosmetic toe surgery is the new designer vagina. We’re not talking about plastic surgery to reconstruct broken toes or to reduce the pain of certain health conditions or defects. If you’re feeling low self-esteem because your piggies are too fat, or perhaps uneven, or perhaps just not delectable enough, you can fix that!

Decry perfectionist standards of beauty if you must, but really, what’s a little toe extension compared to other cosmetic foot procedures throughout history, like foot binding? This is clear progress. Hurrah, civilization!

Third, this week has been full of more odd occurrences than I can possibly digest. In addition to Mr. Wiener-Waterer and the feline-in-vent-saga, I hobbled to urgent care yesterday for what I can only describe as a Toe Thing. I woke up in the middle of the night this week feeling feverish and ill, but the strangest thing about this was that a toe was throbbing with pain. Not the full set, mind you; just the one. Next day, my toe grew progressively worse, swelling to twice its size and slowly incubating a giant, gelatinous blister. Yesterday, I awoke to find a bulging bulls-eye of unspeakable ugliness on my toe, complete with a red inflamed stripe running up my foot. Black widow bite? Tripping through rusty nails on my way to coffee again? Who knows! I captured the full lidocaine-and-lancing glory on my Blackberry, which the doctor thought was awesome. For all my gluttons of gross, just make the jump to see the infectious fun…

Here I am at the doctor’s, all bandaged up.

You can see the inflamed line going up my foot (er, sorta; I’m a terrible photographer and I was a little shaky).

Are you ready to see the blister? Are you sure?

Really?

Next up, foot bath. So far, so good. No mention of needles.

Although I officially have a cankle thanks to this bugger. The doctor wanted to know exactly what I’d been doing to entertain such an infection. I’d like to know, too. Why couldn’t it be something glamorous, like a brown recluse attack?

Let the lidocaine fun begin!

Oops, after 16 jabs or so, the doctor decided we needed a bigger gauge needle. Lucky me! Needles feel great in places with little more than skin and bone and mysterious lesions.

Somehow, I am amazingly resistant to lidocaine. This made the lancing process very fun. Unfortunately, at that point, I was too shaky to take a picture properly. But here is my toe now. They tell me this is an improvement.

But hey, at least I didn’t go septic!

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POSTED IN: Beauty, Extreme, Misc., Oddities