C.M. Rivers

Growing up, I had the privilege of enduring several ingrown toenail surgeries, which culminated in having a third of the nail removed on each of my big toes.  Of course, by that time I was reading a magazine and whistling to myself while blood spurted across the room like a Monty Python skit.  Yet I was not always the stoic Sam Elliott of toenail surgeries that the doctor saw before him that day.  I had journeyed down a long and excruciating road of impaled digits.  I had paid my dues.

The first time I had the procedure done, I yowled like a cat in heat right from the git-go.  My dad – sitting on the other side of a drawn curtain – passed out cold.  The doctor was administering the shot to numb my toe when, THUNK!, something hit the floor.  The “something” turned out to be dad’s head.  Thinking he may have had a heart attack or something, both the doctor and nurse raced to his side, leaving the syringe sticking out of my toe and the needle buried in flesh.  Next thing I knew, they had placed him on a stretcher, wheeled him over alongside me, and deduced that he had simply passed out while listening to his son – who had come to live with him for the school year – cry so pitifully.  I remember laughing about it for a minute before the doctor returned to my toe and began the extraction.  Tears of laughter turned to cries of pain – the kind of pain that makes you want to throw yourself off a building.

When you have an ingrown toenail, the first step is to be in denial as long as possible.  “It’s not an ingrown toenail,” you tell yourself as you carefully un-stick your sock from the red infection on the corner of your toe and clean off the blood and pus.  Weeks later, when you can’t take it any longer (or someone steps on your foot, prompting you to wail like a banshee) you finally break down and go to the doctor.  “That’s an ingrown toenail,” he says, fully aware that you waited as long as humanly possible before coming in and having it removed.  “Why don’t you hop up on the table here?”

The first thing they do is soak your foot in that brackish, stinky, iodine-and-whatever-else water bath, to soften up your flesh.  Usually, as you sit there with your foot in the liquid, you quietly reflect on how screwed you are.  This is typically followed by cursing your ancestors for passing along such an unfortunate hereditary trait.  The doctor then pulls out the needle to administer the numbing agent.  The needle always seems questionably long, considering it’s about to penetrate one of your “little piggies”.  You’re tempted to ask if he’s sure he’s got the right needle, but the pain of the injection derails all thought, as your toe feels like it’s been placed in a vice operated by a mobster you owe money to.  Then, while your toe numbs, the doctor chats lightly with the nurse while at the same time producing a few slender instruments of toe destruction.  You look away, doomed.

Now begins the surgery proper, and the pain is so excruciating that your first mental scream is “I thought you numbed my f—ing toe!”  Somehow you get through it, of course, and they bandage it up, showing you the nail before disposing of it – a sort of medical “treat” I guess.  You leave the office with your foot in an over-sized slipper, because cramming it into a shoe is out of the question.  You’ve never tread so gingerly in your life.  And for the next several days you hope – oh god, do you hope – that nobody steps on your foot.