I wore shoes for 4 hours in December. I can’t remember the
last time I took a shower without involving duct-tape. All
because of a lousy staph infection.
But wait. I digress. Let me take a giant, lurching step backwards.
Back to January of last year. Whilst wearing fancy, leather dress
shoes, I took a step off a loading dock and into a parking lot. This
was not an accident. I was merely taking a shortcut out of a
client’s plant.
When I landed, I crushed a nerve in my foot. I wasn’t aware
of it at the time. The only thoughts in my mind were
1) My foot just exploded
2) My client is still watching me walk away
3) I will try not to curl up in Mr. Client’s parking
lot and
scream like a little girl.
Fast forward about 6 weeks. My wife was sick of me limping
around the house like Quasimoto and demanded that I seek
medical attention.
The doctor took a quick look at my foot and diagnosed it as a
“Morton’s neuroma.” This must be Latin for “watch me stab
you with a giant needle” because that’s exactly what he did.
He fucking stuck a fucking needle into my fucking
foot RIGHT
where it hurt the fucking most. He stuck it through the back
of
my foot, in between my toe knuckles, and directly into the
nerve. He then repeated the process twice more!!
So there I was flopping around on the gurney like a beached
carp, and Doctor Pain has the audacity to say, “Come back
if that doesn’t help.” News flash, Needle-Boy – it didn’t help.
I saw him again. Then I saw a specialist. Then another
specialist. And yet another specialist. All of these people
insisted in driving needles full of cortisone through the back of
my foot and into my nerve. (Actually, one guy started between
my toes and shoved the needle in that way, but the end result
was the same.)
So FINALLY, after nearly a year of this acupuncture from Hell,
an orthopedist told me that the only way I was going to get relief
was to have the nerve cut out of my foot. I suspect this was due
to the fact the poor nerve had been penetrated more times than
Ricky Martin in a Puerto Rican prison, but I didn’t press the issue.
The surgery was to be minor. The recovery time was to be a
couple of days. An incision was made in the top of my foot
starting between the toes and going back a couple of inches
toward my ankle. The foot bones were spread apart, and Captain
Cutlery then cut down to the fat layer just above the skin on the
bottom of my foot. He clipped off the offending nerve and fed
it
to the dog.
Two days later, I was sick. Not only did I feel diseased, I had a
huge infected mess where my foot used to be. I went to the ER.
They told me I had a staph infection.
“No,” I cried, “Anything but my staff!”
I got big drugs. I went back to the Orthopedist. And do you know
what he did? Do you have any idea what that sadist did.? Without
warning, without medication, he REOPENED THE INCISION.
The incision that went nearly all the way through my foot. Ya.
THAT incision. Then (I swear I am not making this up) he packed
it full of gauze.
And here I thought that the whole needle-in-the-inflamed-nerve-trick
was the worst pain ever. Nuh uh. This pain beat that by a country
mile.
Try this at home kids. Cut a deep hole in your foot and scrape the
sides with gauze. Hurts, don’t it? Now go tell Mom that your brother
did this to you. Fun, huh?!
And so began my current odyssey of pain. For about three weeks,
I saw the doctor every couple of days. He’d pull the bloody,
puss-filled strip of gauze out of my foot-hole and jam in another
one. (Did I mention this hurt? Did I? Because it did. It goddamn hurt.)
After a while, I think the doc just got tired of looking at me. He
handed me a pair of tweezers and a jar of sterile gauze, and told
me repack my own festering foot-hole at home…twice a day.
And so I do. Every morning and every evening I pull out a nasty
length of gauze from my foot. Then I push in a fresh one. Its like
that game Operation. Remember the one? You’d take out the
funny-bone. But if you bumped the sides of the “patient,” his nose
would light up. It do the same thing, except I also swear a lot. A
couple of times, I’ve even managed to puke too. Fun for the whole
family.
Self-treatment has been a learning experience. I’ve learned that I
can hurt myself bad enough to actually barf. I learned that bones
are actually kind of slippery. And most important of all, I learned
to never ever ever, no matter what, let isopropyl alcohol touch
exposed nerves.
Oh ya, the duct tape thing – I can’t get the hole wet. So I either tape
a plastic bag around my foot, or just wrap the whole thing in duct
tape. That stuff works for EVERYTHING.