The Toenails of Our Discontent
A multi-generational saga of podophobia
The last time I saw my parents was just over a year ago, when we were gathered at our lake house to celebrate my mom’s retirement. Toward the end of the trip, after dinner, my folks finally convinced me to remove my toenails.
My right big toe had been hurting for a while at that point, but I’d ignored it, and ignored it, then ignored it some more. The delay was due in part to another one of my ailments: acute podophobia. I fear all bare feet, including my own.
My podophobia is the result of years and years of being forced to look at my mom’s bare feet as a child. My mom’s feet are covered in scar tissue (she once told me why, but I’ve blocked out the details…something to do with warts). Her toes are spindly and bent every which-way. My mom also hiked a lot, so her feet were bruised and blistered more often than not. This would all be ok, or slightly less terrible, if my mom wore socks, but she almost never did. Instead, she displayed her feet flagrantly on the dashboard during roadtrips (I sat behind the driver’s seat, so I had the best view), or raised them to near eye level while on her La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room.
Interestingly, mom recently told me she is totally grossed out by her mom’s feet as well. I guess matripodophobia runs in the family.
I love my mom very much—she was then, and remains to this day, one of my biggest role models. Yet I swore to myself from a young age: in this one way, I wouldn’t follow in my mother’s footsteps. No way, José, as she would say. I had turned aside from her ugly footprints, and set my feet on a path toward podiatric beauty.
Other reasons to ignore my throbbing toe were easy to find, as I actually had quite a bit going on at the time. My legs and back had been hurting, sometimes so badly I couldn’t walk. I also had a recurrent UTI that popped up whenever I least expected it, as if I’d been conscripted into a game of misogynistic whack-a-mole. And then there were, of course, the chronic migraines, which had flared beyond my wildest nightmares over the past few months. I’d been to the ER for migraines so often that spring, they eventually kicked me out and (I kid you not) told me not to come back.
I began to pay a little more attention to my toe in April, when the pain started waking me up in the middle of the night, usually after dreaming about dropping a hammer, a brick, or a can of baked beans on my foot. My dog, Donut, also started stepping on my toe multiple times a day, causing me to scream and burst into involuntary tears. He went out of his way to do this—he’d jump on the bed just to step on my toe, then jump back down, or he’d walk over to my desk, step on my toe, then walk away. It was almost as if Donut could smell injured toes like other, smarter, dogs can smell seizures.
Had it been my husband Cory with a hurting toe, Donut would have done something sweet and helpful to alert him of his malady. But Donut and I are forever in a tenuous love/hate relationship, so I did not expect to get such treatment from him. Every time Donut stepped on my toe, I knew exactly what he was thinking: “Hey, stupid lady! This is the toe you need to fix! Get it taken care of before I’m subjected to more of your pitiful whining.”
The toe was now red and swollen, like a fresh, juicy strawberry, and the nail was yellow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d trimmed it, though my other toenails had kept growing as usual. I messaged my doctor, informing her that I had a broken toe, but was there any way to deal with it at home? As much as I liked my doctor, I was also tired and headachey and, frankly, sick of seeing her. The only reason I reached out was because the toe splints Cory had found on Amazon weren’t helping.
“Sorry you’re hurting from head to toe,” she replied. Sigh, I should have seen that one coming.
And then, “You still need to come into the office.” I should have seen that one coming, too.
My toe ended up not being broken, just ingrown beyond belief. (I nearly passed out while the doctor was explaining what exactly this meant. After she brought me a cup of water, I had to explain how I, a chronic pain super deluxe patient, can’t bear the sight of my own bare foot.) This news came as a bit of a surprise, as I’d never had an ingrown toenail before, and I’d never heard that ingrown toes could be so immensely painful. Did I miss the memo on the plight that is ingrown toes, or was I having a rather exceptional first encounter? Perhaps it was a little of both. After all, I didn’t even know what a migraine was until I’d already had one for a week and a half, and my second migraine landed me in the hospital for two weeks. So my body really does like to keep me on my…well, you know.
Back at the lake house, I sat in the living room with my parents, playing a board game while soaking my toe in iodine. The nail had curled in so much on one side that it nearly doubled back on itself, carving my flesh like a spiral-cut ham as it went. The doctor also explained that because I’d been such a negligent toe owner, my nail had up and died out of spite. It had started pussing and bleeding and wiggling at the bottom, like the world’s ugliest loose tooth. A podiatrist told me to soak it every night to stave off further infection. If the nail didn’t fall off soon, then I’d have no choice but to have it pried unceremoniously from the clutches of my swollen skin.
“You really should get it removed, honey,” my mom told me.
“Instant relief!” said my dad.
My dad was referring to his and my mom’s recent tandem toe surgeries. My parents have never been the romantic type. They got married in a courthouse. They don’t share long, tender, kisses. I’ve never seen them walk hand-in-hand on a beach (or anywhere else, for that matter). And yet, they had just gotten their big toenails popped off, on the same day, at the same time, by the same doctor. This struck me as sort of cute, or at least cuter than their usual activities of browsing estate sales and souping up their RV. What will be next, a couples’ massage?!
“Be sure to tell the doctor to kill the nail root after he removes the nail,” my dad continued. “That way, it will never grow back!”
My dad lifted his foot to show me his nail-less big toe. It looked naked, but not ugly. In fact, it was the best-looking toe my dad had ever owned (I remember his toes as being quite ugly as well, though he at least had the decency to wear socks, unlike my mom). Besides, with all the pain I deal with on a daily basis, why keep my toenails around at risk of further trouble? What are toenails even good for, anyway? Fingernails are useful for all sorts of things: scratching your head, popping pimples, peeling stickers off of fruit. But toenails are really more like tonsils or appendices than they are like fingernails.
Shortly after this conversation with my parents, I was still, unfortunately, in full possession of my right big toenail. So I half-hobbled, half-marched into my podiatrist’s office, bound and determined to kiss my toenail goodbye.
This is when I found out that podiatrists are either very sentimental creatures, or they have a lot less job security than I thought. My podiatrist agreed to remove the nail, but when I told him I’d like him to kill the nail root, too, he launched into a full-blown fear-mongering campaign.
“You are so young!” he said. “What if you end up wanting a toenail later in life?” (For pedicures? Or will my toenails be my only friends when I’m old and lonely? He left this up to my imagination.)
“Uh, I don’t think I’ll need it. It’s just a toenail.”
“But having no nail will put you at risk of getting a bulbous toe.”
He didn’t explain what “bulbous” meant, nor what makes a bulbous toe worse than a bleeding, pussing, ingrown toenail. But he had a grave look on his face that made me want to avoid this outcome at all costs.
“And besides,” he continued, “toenails basically never come back ingrown after getting removed.”
So I hesitantly agreed to have him remove the nail, but let it grow back over the next year.
He then lowered a paper towel between me and my toe, which was elevated near eye level in the exam chair. I was glad to finally stop looking at it. He also sprayed my toe with liquid nitrogen, to “numb the area” before shooting three syringes of lidocaine into my smarting, swollen strawberry. As it turned out, the liquid nitrogen was just about as useful in dulling the needle stabs to my soft, sensitive toe skin as a Dixie cup filled with water would be in dousing a five-alarm fire.
“Those lidocaine shots were the absolute worst pain I’ve ever experienced,” I told Cory that night over dinner, ignoring his rather unreasonable preference for “less gross” dinnertime conversation topics.
“Seriously?” he said. “You’ve been hospitalized for migraines. Wasn’t the one you had in the ER a few months ago worse than the toe shots?”
“I guess that was pretty bad. But still, these shots were way worse. Perhaps it has something to do with the relative sizes involved?”
Or, maybe, if I weren’t already in pain all the time, I wouldn’t have cried my eyes out over a few lidocaine shots. Everyone tells me I “must be so tough” after being in pain for so long, but that’s not even close to how chronic pain works. The longer the pain lasts, the more of a wimp I become. This is a real thing called nervous system over-sensitization—basically, the brain gets so worn down by chronic pain, it flips out at the drop of a pin, or at a few lidocaine shots to the toe.
After a miserable week of peeling dried puss and gauze off my throbbing, naked toe (“instant relief” is not something my body understands), I was left with nine toenails, a raw indentation, and high hopes. Without the ingrown toenail, migraines and leg pain were the only things keeping me up at night (if we don’t count the car alarms, sirens, screaming neighbors, barking dogs, and snoring husbands). It was, really, a huge improvement.
So you can imagine my dismay when, nine months later, I was back at the podiatrist’s office. While in the hospital the week before, slamming my migraines with drugs, I noticed that my big toes were hurting. Yes, both of them. My left big toenail, which had been well-behaved so far, was curling inward, slicing my skin. My right one, the one I’d removed, had grown most of the way back, but in the final stretch, with less than a centimeter to go, the nail had taken a nosedive straight into my skin. It was, remarkably, ingrown on the front.
The podiatrist advised removing the nails and killing the nail root this time, but only on the edges of my toes. This would leave me with two half-sized big toenails, when all was said and done.
“Don’t worry,” he said as he prepared twice as many lidocaine injections, “with the edges removed, toenails basically never come back ingrown.”
Then he started mercilessly stabbing my toes. As I clawed Cory’s shoulder and wiped my watering eyes, I thought to myself, Do half toenails look creepier than no toenails at all?
As it’s been a few months since my double toe surgery, I now know the answer to this question: Yes, yes they do.
Thanks to my chronic ingrown toenails, it appears I’m doomed to inherit my mom’s ugly feet. But perpetuating podophobia? That is a choice. So I’m taking the high road. I choose to always wear socks.