This little piggy went to market

 

One of my early memories is me and the boys climbing onto my mum’s bed before she got up and coaxing her to endlessly dramatise  the classic nursery rhyme  “This little piggy went to market” accompanied by the obligatory tweaking of the toes. This resulted in hysterics all round after the classic line “and this little piggy went wee wee wee wee all the way home,” which prompted her to abandon the toes and tickle us all over.  I had to ‘Google’ the rhyme. It turns out it was first heard in 1728 but not published till 1760. I always thought she had made it up.

Apart from that early memory I have never really given toes a lot of thought. In fact, can’t say I’ve ever seriously considered them.   I can see why fingers and fingernails are necessary but toes and toenails – that’s  a bit of a mystery. In the last 6 months though toes have been on my mind a lot. My mum has two rather problematic big toe nails. They have completely different issues. Both of which probably stem from her previous long term and long distance walking habit. She used to go walking round the village, walking to Tesco and back (quite a walk), walking round Strathclyde Park (I could barely keep up), walking into the next town and back, walking anywhere and everywhere.  She couldn’t stop either – she has a condition where if she stands still she wobbles and falls over so it you met her while walking you had to walk with her if you wanted a chat. She had a thing about walking and I seem to remember her going to a chiropodist on a regular basis. Now that may have been for her strange toe nails. I have no clue and she can’t remember.

Both toe nails were a bit dicey when she arrived over a year ago.  Both very much thicker in places than they should have been. One was growing at a slant and looked completely askew. The other was prone to infections and was beginning to curl inwards.  After looking for a chiropodist and being told that they didn’t exist in Sri Lanka by my local hospital, I reluctantly succumbed to cutting her toe nails fairly often in order to combat the peculiarities that were the 2 big toenails. Despite my attempts the big toe nail became ingrown and infected  which was very painful and therefore had to be faced up to and acted on.

I dreaded the whole doctor thing. I reckoned the nail would have to be removed.  Visions of torture scenes in the movies loomed large in my brain. I typically imagine the worst possible scenarios. (I’m very good at risk assessment).  I imagined my mum screaming  while the doctor struggled to pull her nail out  while she was held down by numerous nurses;  this was followed by a heart attack because it was all too much for someone her age. If I could get beyond the actual pulling out of the nail, then I had the resultant wound being infected, going all horrible, then getting gangrenous and the whole foot having to be removed. Like I say, I seem to be a pessimist.  I think I ended up being closer to a heart attack than she did. And this was even before it was confirmed that it had to be removed.

The pain continued and we did end up at the hospital. Strangely enough we ended up at the same doctor who supervised the healing of my ankle and leg after my op in Scotland. This was good as he had proved sound on my healing so I reckoned he could probably deal with a toenail.  Just as I had imagined it, he confirmed that the toenail would have to be removed;  but he said that he might be able to just cut the sides of it and not have to take the whole thing out. And this could be done under a local anaesthetic. This hadn’t been part of my horror scenario – either the part removal or the anaesthetic!   Mum was put on two very large tablets which became known as the toe tablets  the week before the op. 

I worried about it all week. Mum forgot about it completely. She was only reminded about her toe when she accidentally touched it with something and it was sore.  I wasn’t sure how much she was understanding exactly what was going to happen but we had had a rather coherent conversation at the beginning of all this because of the pain. We turned up and she had to get a test to make sure she wouldn’t react to the anaesthetic. This involved the nurse taking some blood and then writing on her arm round the needle site. This intrigued mum and we spent a good while trying to figure out what it said. Her writing wasn’t very clear.  Then she was taken away into an inner room.  All I could hear was laughter which turned out to be at her attempt at climbing onto the rather high bed. She couldn’t do it so she came back out to where I was and I was kicked out of that place.  I tried to focus on Facebook on my iphone while waiting for the screaming. There was none. The doctor came out and said ‘come and see’.  My immediate reaction was that I really didn’t want to see a bloody toe and could happily live without that particular experience.  Of course you can’t really say that to a doctor so I followed him and looked. No blood – there must have been some earlier but not when I looked.  He’d managed to just cut the edges down the sides off. It actually looked like a normal nail for the first time in over a year.

She got a huge bandage on her toe which continually surprised her whenever she noticed it. She didn’t remember the small op or the whole hospital experience. Sometimes Alzheimers comes in handy.  The toe nail has now healed beautifully.  We visited a beauty salon today for her to have a pedicure. She loved it.  Hopefully regular pedicures will keep the other big toe nail under control and we won’t have to go back to the hospital.  I doubt though that I will be tweaking her toes anytime soon to the accompaniment of “This little piggy went to market.”