I'm going to tell you, the steristrips they put over the incisions when they remove the sutures? They get ICKY!! Their purpose is to help hold the skin closed, so the incision heals well, and we always tell our patients to leave them on until they start to peel off independently, but I couldn't wait. The juices that ooze out of a healing incision just mess them up. After a week, I peeled them off, and stuck some dressings of my own over them, until the weeping stopped. (even after bleeding stops and in the absence of infection, which would result in a greenish, icky discharge and smell, incisions can ooze a yellowish liquid for weeks...especially when the foot is swollen, which it will likely continue to get when I am up and about, until walking around like normal)
By 4 weeks, the weeping has pretty much stopped, and the scabs are about all gone, as is the bruising, but the peeling continues. See the wrinkly skin?? That's all going to peel off eventually:
No-one tells you ahead of time that the swelling will cause the skin on your
foot to start to flake and peel....I have been putting a coconut oil scrub on
the parts between the incisions but until I can massage the entire foot, the
dermabond around the incisions and the skin won't all peel off completely....so
I delicately do what I can. Coconut oil is wonderful for moisturizing....I used
it on my knee, which developed a sort of callus from the knee scooter the first
week...now it's no longer sore and flaking, and the coconut oil keeps it moist.
Sort of like elbow skin, if not moistened, it gets dry and Elephant-skin
looking.
And the swelling is dependent now....just when my foot is down. Like in the shower. I take a shower, then sit back down with my foot up to allow it to dry and the fluid drain back, before putting my boot on each day.
Of course, sticking this foot into a pedicure tub and having a pedicurist scrub
away at it is out of the question until it heals up a bit more (2 weeks after
the pin is removed I should be able to get one....I'm counting the days!!), so
I do what I can at home.
Yesterday, Dr. Ritchey removed the pin in my hammertoe. A hammertoe is when a toe gets bent over years time into an unnatural position, usually because of the shoes worn (too small, etc, which has been my problem with size 11 feet since my teen years, and 20 years ago, there wasn't the internet to buy bigger shoes; I had to make do with what we could find in town. And our town had a lot of ladies with larger feet. O-kay, so many of them were related to me, but still....)
This particular hammer toe had become so warped that when I walked, it slid up under the toe next to it, and become very painful. (it's the fourth one, beside the pinky).
Now as this was the part of the foot that still gave me some pain from time to time since surgery, especially after the busy Memorial Day weekend. I knew, in part, this was because of the foreign body in it (the pin, holding the broken bone straight so it will set right), so I was glad to be getting rid of it, even as I dreaded the process.
Other than a couple of times at the end of the day that busy Memorial Day weekend, I hadn't been taking anything stronger than Motrin, but for this, in anticipation of the discomfort to come, I took 2 Percocet before going in for my appointment, knowing that this was going to be uncomfortable. I had Jeff drive me....I had already driven a bit, taking my boot off and strapping a sandal on over an ace bandage, so I COULD have driven myself, but as loopy as Percocet makes me, I wasn't taking that chance.
After x-rays verified that everything was healing nicely, the process began. Now a pin looks very much like a finishing nail without a head, very smooth, with a point, so that when the doctor places it in surgery, he could push it into the toe, stabilizing it in it's new position....It actually surprised me how thick it was. No WONDER that toe was so sore!!
Of course, as the pin had shifted a bit, or rather, in his words, the end 2 segments of the toe had slid on the pin, so it was good it was being removed, before it slid down any further. But this meant that he was going to have to use a scalpel to cut in a bit to grab hold of the pin.
He used a numbing spray on the surface, but that couldn't numb deep down where he was injecting the lidocaine to numb the toe, and that was excruciating for about 30 seconds. I'm a nurse, I know that when you inject something, even if you numb the surface, the medication being injected under than numb skin hurts. It just does. Doesn't mean I was going to like it. I gritted my teeth, squeezed the heck out of the armrests of the table, then it was done.
But I didn't watch. If it were anyone else, as a nurse, I'd be watching the procedure, but I can't even watch when I get my own blood drawn (something I've done to other people many times), there was no way I was going to be able to watch him slice into my toe and grab hold of a pin and pull it out....so I closed my eyes while he sliced and gripped, and VOILA!! Dr. Ritchey handed me a hemostat with the finishing-nail looking pin on it. Weird!!
Of course, I've been taking Motrin for weeks, which can thin the blood, so I bled like a stuck pig...after holding pressure on it for a few minutes, he slapped some bandaids on it as a make-shift pressure dressing. (12 hours later I took them off, and guess what....more bleeding!! If anyone ever needs my DNA, there's blood on my carpet....more bandaids. By the next day it had stopped, though)
He then told me to park the scooter and start walking with the boot on. Hallelujah!!! Freedom!!!
I pushed the scooter out to the waiting room, walking on my boot, and Jeff was like "Uh oh, she's free!!"....of course, with the Percocet in my system, it felt pretty good, so I happily walked to the car.
I went home and slept off the Percocet.
Later that night, after waking up from my Percocet-induced nap, I cleaned bathrooms, but with the lidocaine worn off and the Percocet effects done, I discovered, no surprise, it was going to be a bit more uncomfortable than it was at first....but dangit, my bathrooms hadn't been cleaned properly since right before my surgery, if I had to do it in stages, I was going to clean them!! (and for those who say "Why can't your honey clean the bathrooms?", I point out the obvious....bachelor cleaning and MY cleaning are 2 different things!! :) )
Aside from the soreness, and needing frequent breaks, not having to use crutches or a scooter for the first time in a month felt amazing. And getting rid of that pin did decrease the discomfort I had been having at the base of that toe, discomfort probably related to the foreign body in my foot. Why you ask? Well, have you ever had a sliver? If you have, then you know that if you don't get it out pretty quickly, it starts to get red and inflamed; the effects of your body attacking the foreign body in it, trying to get rid of it.
But the boot takes some getting used to walking in. Hit an uneven spot wrong, your knee tries to go backwards. And I'm walking on a lightly padded hard boot...these first few days I need frequent breaks to rest the foot, decrease the pain. By the end of the day, I'm watching TV with the boot off, my foot up, as I have since surgery.
There are numb spots in my foot still...near the incisions, as nerves that were cut or abused during the surgery take time to heal; the inside of the hammer toe that has the incision on it, the inside of the toe next to it....some of this is just because of surgery, some is because he rooted around inside my foot, trying to find that danged neuroma that was thought to be the cause of all the pain in the ball of my foot, and sorting out the tangle of nerves that were in there...some nerve damage was to be expected. And some of it will heal, as the body finds other ways to get nerve signals to those areas; but I might still have some numb spots permanently. But thanks to the fact that there WASN'T a neuroma in there that he had to remove, I've got a whole lot less numbness than I could have had.
Addendum: a week after I was told to start walking in the boot more, I added an insole. I'm sorry, I guess my tender tootsie status is going to continue...yeah, it might get better once everything is healed up...but my heel is killing me in that boot!! I happened to have a bunch of insoles I had tried over the years, so I stuck one in there...we'll see if it helps. Well, off to clean the house!!
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