Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Progress report
I went for another follow-up on my foot this morning. When I left I didn't know whether to throw up or cry...

Here's how I got to this point. 5-7 years ago I had a planter's wart. I tried to make it go away with a salicylic acid pad. I was not successful. Once I got down so far and the skin was raw and bloody I quit. It healed over, leaving scar tissue. Every year or so I'd try again, same thing. I never got to the "seed" and the pain would get so bad I'd quit. So by last month I had this giant knot of scar tissue a centimeter wide with, I assumed, a planter's wart buried way beneath.

When the doc reamed out the hole he said it showed no sign of a wart. He suspected I'd gotten something in there along the way and the tissue was building up around it to protect my body from the foreign object. Whatever. He cut away all the suspect tissue and left me with a hole larger than a centimeter. It couldn't be stitched. It needed to slowly heal closed. Fine.

Cut to a week later, it's still bleeding and oozing but that's what it's supposed to be doing. The big risk is getting a nasty bacteria in there, but I've been very careful keeping it cleaned and swamped in bacitracin. Today I go in for my appointment expecting him to pronounce decent progress.

He looks at it and says he's not sure that "it's" not coming back. I assume he means the scarry tissue or the wart. Then he starts saying that if his surgery didn't fix the problem he'd need to refer me to a podiatrist or a plastic surgeon because I'd need to have a bigger chunk taken out of my foot. He thought it might need to be biopsied. Then he started rambling on about the different kinds of cancer... He stopped to confirm it's been there for 5-7 years. Yes, so probably not cancer. Still, even though I know he was thinking aloud, he rattled the hell out of me.

The whole point in getting this done now was so that I could heal up and enjoy my summer. Now he's talking about sending me for more painful, debilitating surgery and a more protracted recovery period. And think of the cost! I hobbled out of the appointment thoroughly shaken.

I moped around all morning. Finally at lunchtime M gave me a pep talk. His point was that if the thing heals and doesn't hurt me then I shouldn't feel the need to rush to the next round of surgery. Even if it needs to be done, if there's no immediate pain then there's no immediate rush. He advocating letting the healing process complete and then seeing where we are. Very sensible.

So now I'm less panicked than before, but still regretting the whole deal. I never expected it to end up such a mess.