My Toe

He obviously didn’t think I’d be too squeamish, or he wouldn’t have suggested it. And he wanted to get the point across, I guess.

My podiatrist, that is. He was alarmed at the condition of my foot bones. Oh, the hammertoe he knew about- that was common, and the surgery to fix it routine. It was the thin-ness of my foot bones that concerned him. He first pointed it out while showing me several views of my foot x-rays on his lap-top computer.

“Do you take calcium?” he asked.

Yes. Calcium and vitamin D and proper diet and exercise... for decades. It’s just not right, I thought. The x-ray must be wrong.

But then... after the surgery... he sat me up so that I could view the little metal tray with slightly bloody surgical instruments, one piece of white gauze, and... on the gauze a small piece of bone, glistening red. I knew it had been nestled within the smallest toe of my right foot a only minutes ago. Removing it was the cure to my painful toe condition.

“I want you to feel this.” he said, “Take these.” he handed me a small pair of surgical clippers, probably the same ones that he had used to excise the bone. “I want you to cut this in half.” he said as he guided the scissors to the lump of bone that lay on the gauze..

I obediently snipped at the fragment. pressing down until it was clipped in two. I noted that it had the texture of styrofoam. OK, maybe a little tougher than that, but it wasn’t like bone... or what I thought bone would be like anyway...

So, yeah, that was this morning. The good news is that I get to sit around nursing my foot for a week or so. The bad news is that I’ve got to see my physician about getting a bone density scan to see if the rest of my bones are that thin. I still can’t believe it....

.