I’m currently bed-ridden. Or at least sofa-ridden. Yesterday I underwent major surgery and I’m now convalescing at home. Actually, major surgery may be stretching it a bit – I had a verruca (or plantar wart, as they call them here) removed. But for all the palaver they made over it, it may as well have been major surgery.
It all started out simply enough with a very small verruca on the ball of my left foot. Finn had a couple of them recently (so I know where it came from…) and we managed to freeze his off at home, in about a week. Naturally, mine was an entirely different bag of worms, and a much more serious proposition. We’d used up all of the freeze stuff on Finn, so I opted for little acid patches. Unfortunately, the verruca just seemed to feed on them, and after a month of using them the verruca had mutated into a huge cluster of nasty-looking black things, and I was limping everywhere because I couldn’t put my foot down without crying like a little girl at the pain.
By this stage it was a significant lump, raised maybe 0.5cm up from the skin. The wife suggested that I could probably peel the dead skin off the top and re-apply the acid a bit deeper. So I took a craft knife to it, trimmed round the edge, and peeled it back. It didn’t like that at all, and started spewing blood out like a mini volcano. I hoped I’d at least given it a mortal wound, so once I’d stopped it bleeding I left it alone for a week or so to until the scab had dropped off and I could see what was left. But at the end of the week the little bugger was still alive, and seemed to have called in reinforcements in a bid to colonize my entire foot.
I finally conceded defeat and called in the professionals. My regular doctor had a waiting list of two weeks, which was ridiculous, so I went to see a specialist foot doctor (the very capable and amiable Ngoc-Loan Nguyen at Everyone’s Foot Specialist) recommended by a friend of a friend of the wife’s. She (the doctor) didn’t quite recoil in horror, but I could tell she was a bit taken aback by the state of it, and was distinctly unimpressed by my DIY surgery efforts. The bottom line was that it was now beyond over-the-counter treatment and I would need surgery to remove it.
The last time I had a verruca was at boarding school, and the school nurse (Sister Gill – or Sister Kill as we (unimaginatively) christened her on the basis of her rather ruthless approach to treatment) simply dug it out with what appeared to be a sharpened melon-baller. I still have the scar from that one, to this day. Thankfully, medical science has advanced somewhat in the past 30 years (!) and the treatment now involved lasering it out. I didn’t actually see the laser because I was under a general anaesthetic (versus no anaesthetic at the bony old hands of Sister Kill), but I imagine it was much like the one in Goldfinger where James Bond is strapped to a table with the laser inching closer to his meat an’ two veg. Judging by the size of the hole it left in my foot, it could well have been the same one. Had I not been unconscious, I’m sure I would have heard the sizzling of flesh and seen wisps of smoke rising up from my foot, as the doctor cackled “No, Mr. Manuel, I expect you to die!”.
Obviously such ‘major’ surgery comes with many risks – the most significant of which is apparently me suing the hospital and/or doctor if it all goes horribly wrong. So we had to have a pre-operation meeting (although I’d already seen the doctor several times already) where I had to sign several waivers, consent forms, and a new will leaving everything to a Dr. Shipman. The (female) doctor also told me that I’d have to take off all of my clothes – including my underwear – for the surgery. I’m still not entirely convinced that this was entirely necessary for foot surgery, but you have to assume they know what they’re doing. But if photos of my kibbles and bits appear on the Internet then I know where they came from.
The surgery itself went fine (as far as I could tell from my unconscious state) and I was back at work (or at least logged on, via my laptop, on the sofa) within an hour of coming round from the anaesthetic. As I suspected – and contrary to the pre-surgery p(r)ep talk – there was no pain, and recovery seemed to be going pretty well, until I went to the bathroom in the afternoon. I’d no sooner parked myself back on the sofa than the wife announced “Who’s just walked through here, making a mess?”. I looked back and noticed that I’d left a trail of bloody footprints across the floor. So much for the ‘no bleeding’ the doctor promised. So we rushed back round to the surgery, where the doctor un-reassuringly stated “Well, this has never happened before!” She stripped off the blood-soaked bandages, remarking “Keep these – you may need them” (!?), and wrapped half-a-dozen new ones around my foot so thickly that I looked as though I had a club foot, before sending me on my way again. But not sooner had I got home than the blood started pouring out again. I reasoned that there was little point in going back to the doctor’s if all she was going to do was replace the bandages again, so I just retired to the sofa, and eventually from there to bed.
Though I don’t know why I bothered going to bed at all, as I didn’t get any sleep. Whatever anaesthetic they’d injected me with at the hospital wore off around midnight, leaving me in excruciating pain. Not from the excision – that was fine. But the doctor had wrapped the latest set of bandages so tight that my toes had gone numb (and purple) and the constant pressure on my bony feet was unbearable. My foot felt it was being crushed in a vice – like that guy’s head in Casino. So today I had to go back to the doctor again, and get my foot re-re-mummified. Hopefully for the last time as, like my dad, I don’t take to incapacitation too well, and this recovery is taking its toll on the family more than it is me, and it can’t be long before they stuff the bloody bandages in my mouth and take turns beating the crap out of me with the crutches I’m otherwise hobbling about on…
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