Have you ever had to endure the long process of one of your precious toenails slowly falling off? It is not a fun experience and once it starts there is nothing you can do to stop it. From the time you notice the little blister forming under your nail to a month later when the dead, warped nail finally falls off, all you can do is watch in horror.
The first week is the most destructive and the most painful of the four week process. My first week began after I had spent a day playing racquetball. I was not used to running for long periods of time and my feet began to hurt after about two hours of chasing after the ball. I ignored the pain and continued playing for two more hours. When I got home I took off my tennis shoes and gasped in horror at the huge blister on my left foot. Being so occupied with the appearance of this blister I didn’t even notice the pain my right toenail was in.
The next day I put a band-aid over my gross blister and wore flip-flops to a friend’s house. I finally realized the pain my toenail was in when my friend accidentally stepped on my toe. The pressure of her foot on my toe was so excruciating that I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. I went home and looked carefully at my toenail and discovered that the end of my nail was raised up a little. I had never lost a toenail before so I didn’t know what was happening, I just thought my toe was badly bruised.
However, a couple days later I realized that there was indeed a blister underneath my toenail. The blister seemed to be getting bigger everyday and was becoming more painful as well. My nail was raised about 3 centimeters by the liquid underneath it and the pain of the pressure was so horrible that I limped when I walked. I refused to accept the fact that my toenail was falling off and hoped that by ignoring it, it might heal itself. It had been about a week since I noticed the blister and it was not going down. I couldn’t take the pain anymore and my dad suggested that I drill a little hole in my nail to let the liquid come out. I didn’t like the idea of drilling a hole in any part of my body so instead I took a needle and poked a hole in the blister that was showing at the end of my nail. Immediately a yellow liquid began to squirt out of the hole.
I felt so much better after I had drained the liquid out from under my nail that I had hope my nail would not fall off. A couple hours later the blister was filled with liquid again and I took the needle and reopened the hole that had been clogged with dry puss so that the liquid could be drained again. For about two days the blister kept filling up and I would keep draining it, but then it began to dry up and my toe didn’t hurt at all anymore. The aftermath of the blister left my nail warped upward and the skin attaching the end of my nail to my toe began to die. The skin around my nail began to itch and in a few days it was dead and peeling. The skin between the end of my nail and toe peeled off and since my nail was so warped and wasn’t attached to my toe at all accept for the cuticle, I was actually able to see my toe underneath my toenail.
Being a girl, I didn’t like the idea of only having nine toenails so I tried desperately to reattach the nail by daily filling the space between my nail and toe with skin ointment. This didn’t do any good and after about a week my nail was so warped and obviously falling off that I just sat down and without any pain at all peeled my nail off. It didn’t hurt because the nail was already unattached from my toe, the only thing that was keeping it on was the cuticle of my toenail, which I was easily able to peel away from my toe since it had already been turning into dead skin.
Since I had never lost a toenail before I was surprised when I lifted the dead nail from my toe and saw that there was already a new toenail growing. It was about the size of a macaroni noodle and looked funny. I researched online to find out what other people do when they lose a toenail and if there was anything I could do to make my new nail grow faster. I found out that I had what is called a “runner’s toe” which is what often happens to people who do not run on a regular basis and the rubbing of the shoe up against the toenail creates a blister underneath the nail. It has been a month now and the short, stubby little toenail is slowly but surely growing… I hope.
