Fair warning, this is kind of a gross post. Feel free to judge me. Or skip it.
I have already mentioned that I have been dealing with a horribly painful, swollen area next to my big toenail, so today I am happy to report that... *drumroll*... it finally appears to be on the mend.
As a lifelong dancer and few year runner, I am no stranger to foot issues. I have arthritis in my big toe joints, a neuroma in my left foot between the third and fourth toes, and my feet haven't been ache or pain free on any given day due to these issues since my late 20s. It's okay, though. I've learned to work with it. Movement helps a lot, as do shoes with a wide toe box, soaking them in warm water with epsom salt, using an AcuBall, and using products such a Salonpaas and Arnica Gel.
However, there is one type of pain that so help me God I am not prepared to deal with, and that is the throbbing pain of an ingrown toenail. As luck would have it, I developed one on the inside part of my big toenail more than two weeks ago. I travelled with it, ran a half marathon with it, and then came home to continue my regular training. Regardless of epsom salt soaks and cleaning it with peroxide and smothering the area with Neosporin, the darn infection just kept getting worse.
At the end of last week, I was at the breaking point. It was throbbing so badly that my walk had been reduced to a hobble and I had to skip a couple of my regular runs because it was just too uncomfortable to even wear my running shoes.
Finally, I tried my last-resort home remedy option, which is one that my husband used ages ago. After dropping a guitar case on his big toe, which literally caused the most disgusting toenail I have ever seen, a doctor recommended soaking a cotton ball in rubbing alcohol, pulling small pieces of the cotton off, and shoving the cotton up under the ingrown part of the nail. Sounds gross, right? Believe me, it was, and I'm not really sure what's more surprising to me... the fact that I still dated him after seeing that unsightly mess in a pair of flip-flops (which were the only shoes he'd wear), or the fact that it took several years for his toenail to finally heal. Whatever the case, it was disgusting. So repulsive, in fact, he tells this hilarious story of the time that one of his college professors was lecturing in front of the class and stopped mid-sentence in front of James with a look of horror and screamed, "Oh my god! What happened to your toe?! You should see a doctor! That's what they're there for!" Yes, that's a true story.
Anyway, worried that I would develop a toenail that scares small children, I went about the painful process of soaking cotton in rubbing alcohol, balling up a small piece, and using a nail pick to carefully shove that tiny piece up under the corner of the nail. It was so excruciating that I nearly screamed, but I finally got it up under there. Within ten minutes, the throbbing dulled significantly. I kid you not. I slept on it, awoke to a still-swollen toe, sighed, dealt with the pain of removing and reapplying the cotton, and went about my life repeating the process through the weekend. The third time I did it, I also jammed a small bit of the cotton to the side of my toenail where the major part of the pain was originating.
The next day, the swelling and pain was reduced dramatically, and it was far easier to get much more cotton up under the nail. I've done that for five days now, and let me tell you, my nail stopped hurting completely by yesterday morning.
I'm still a little worried that the pain will come back because I can feel a minor amount of residual swelling when I press on it, so I'm going to keep adding that cotton to the area until my toenail appears completely back to normal. In the meantime, I'm just going to put this out there: don't wait until your ingrown toenail is so painful you can hardly walk. Just try this remedy from the get-go. It actually works.
If you've gotten this far, kudos to you. That was a gross one, and you deserve a lifetime of zero ingrown toenails just for getting through it.
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