My Mum had ingrowing toenail surgery!

23 Apr 2020 | Patient Stories, Skin & Toenails

My Mum had recently been struggling with a niggly ingrowing toenail! It wasn’t too bad, and she had been able to look after it herself for a while but it was getting worse and starting to interfere with her hiking and cycling! She came to me to help her with it a couple of time sand I suggested that ingrowing toenail surgery was  a good options for her to sort it out one and for all… but she was not having any of it!

Mum was worried mostly about the time off from her activities and she was a little scared of the injections. These are normal and very common concerns when considering toenail surgery. But she made the brave decision to bear the injections for the long term benefit.

Look, I won’t lie, the local anaesthetic (LA) injections are not nice, but often they are not worse than the discomfort of the ingrowing toenail.

There are a few ways I make them more tolerable:

  1.  Explaining exactly where I was going to inject so there are no surprises.
  2.  Warming up the LA to body temperature before injecting.
  3.  Don’t watch me inject! Close your eyes. My Mum chose to look out the window.
  4. Deep breaths…
  5. And of course good injecting technique.

Rockstar Mum handled the injections like a pro! She was actually surprised that it wasn’t as torturous as she imagined (that is the biggest compliment you can give me!).

After that, the rest of the procedure was a breeze and we chatted about Covid-19, sewing, gardening and life in lock-down.

My Mum’s ingrowing toenail only bothered her on one side of of her left big toenail, and so I only removed that section of the nail. It is not necessary to remove the whole nail (that is reserved for very specific nail conditions and traumas). I make sure I take as much as necessary and as little as possible.

I dressed Mum’s toe with a bright orange dressing to remind her to take it easy for a few days.

I am happy to say that she has been following the homecare instructions and is healing well, with no complications. She was a nurse in her younger days, so I expected nothing less.

Happy patient, Happy Mum!

I will keep you posted on her progress…

 

 

 

UPDATE: watch the VIDEO here!