Bits and Pieces

After having broken a glass, and carefully cleaned it up, there is nothing worse than realising that your feet helped you do that…

              Glass shatters…. oh no!
              Keep the kids away from the scene of danger.
              Put on shoes.
              Get the dustpan and brush and just about rearrange the whole dining room to get all the tiny little shards seen glistening in the light.
              Job done, shoes off, back to enjoying the weekend!

2 weeks later….

An irritating thing under your foot, cant see anything, tried to scratch it out… no luck. 
It starts to form a thickening and it is getting more sore.
A trip to the GP who scratches around with a scalpel and some tweezers tells you he cant see anything and there might still be something in there…. 
Feels better for a few days, but then back to the lump and pain.

Time for a trip to the Podiatrist… 

This is a story I hear pretty regularly and is rather typical of a piece of glass stuck in a foot! 
Sometimes there is nothing more to see than a small patch of slightly red skin, and sometimes the skin over the area is thick and has formed a lump. 
If another practitioner has had a go at it, then there is often a scab or dry blood in the thickened skin.

I load my tiny scalpel blade, and get out a pair of tiny tweezers…

Fishing for glass is just that…. fishing…. you can’t see it, but you can feel when it bites. 
Shaving the thickened skin is not too bad, but as I get down to the tiny shard of glass, I rely on it catching on the blade to feel it, particularly if there is blood involved.
At this point it may be uncomfortable as the blade passes over and moves the glass. I need to figure out its orientation. 

Sometimes it slides out, or I get a glimpse of it, grab it with the tweezers and pull it out…

And sometimes there is nothing… at which point I tell my patient not to worry, if it is out, it will feel better, but if it is still in there, it will rear its head again as the body tries to reject it, and then a few days later, we will have a better shot of finding it. 

 A short stint with an antiseptic dressing, and the skin heals up perfectly fine!