Saturday, June 18, 2011

Recovery Update & Sadistic Sullivan

Dr. Sullivan is cool. But he likes to do stuff to my feet that could be considered torture, by some. When you hear a CLICK as you bend a toe violently back-- well it's not pleasant even if it doesn't hurt too much...

I was having an issue with a hammer toe (the pointer toe next to the stump) because of walking more and more. I got in to see Dr. Sullivan's partner at the Lafayette Foot Center (or whatever it's called) last Friday. Dr. Oliver used a dremel-type thing to obliterate the pointer toe's funky nail and then he wrapped it so it was huge and sorta straight. There was a little bit of a wound on the tip of the toe because of the hammer-ness. So I got a course of antibiotics to help knock out the infection too.

This Friday I got to see Dr. Sullivan. It was a joy to see him because he's got a sense of humor and he's blunt if there's something horribly wrong that needs to be chopped off. Plus he's an IU grad so he's one of the few sane people in Purdue-ville. He said the pointer toe looked good and then did a horrible procedure to the tendons in the pointer toe to straighten it out.

He took a needle-thing (that's the technical medical term, I'm sure) and poked it into the joint and wiggled it around some. This snapped the tendon, at least that's how I understood it when Dr. Oliver explained it last week. Then he did it at the other joint!

Dr. Sullivan loves his work.

He then straightened it out and pushed it back what seemed like WAAAY too far for a toe to go back comfortably. He wrapped it and said I was good to go.

Like the kid in class who reminds the teacher she forgot to give out any homework, I asked if the other toes looked okay to him. With glee, he pushed all of them, one at a time, WAAAY too far back. Most of them made snapping sounds and the pinky toes on both feet are bruised today. That should teach me to ask if my toes look okay- they're butt-ugly and they're fine...

Now for some possibly disturbing toe shots from Sullivan's office. The stump has been described by some as looking sorta 'snout-like'- you be the judge:






I go back in a couple of weeks for more torture follow-up on the toe straightening. He may do the procedure on some of the others then, but let's hope not....

3 comments:

  1. I think you should have comparison photos of the toe a week prior... When it was swollen to twice the size, and infected and bright red with purple. "Selective memory," perhaps?

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  3. Perhaps. Unfortunately there isn't any photographic evidence of that toe. I choose to think of it as a distant half-remembered exaggeration.

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