Suck! My Toe!

That, my friends, is a photo of the big toe on my right foot. Notice (how could you not?) that the skin is, for the lack of a better word, fraying—literally peeling away like an onion (I hate onions!) for presumably no reason. Notice that the dangling pieces of skin in the upper, middle region of my toe are substantially thick, at least as far as dangling pieces of skin are wont to go. This causes quite a problem whenever I pull a blanket over my legs (every night!) or walk around on carpet in my bare feet (every morning!) and these dangling pieces of skin unfailingly snag on the respective fabric. It sucks! It hurts! It bleeds! I have to trim these dangling pieces of skin with a nail clipper in order to avoid such minor catastrophes!

Fortunately, this fraying is not consistent. It seems like it’s only every two or three weeks that I might go through a few days of extra dry (I guess that’s the problem?) toe skin. I think all of this has something to do with the fact that I now limp, and so I am not standing on my feet in quite the same way I used to. My feet are still adjusting. Consider: it is only the big toe, it is only on my right foot, and what’s more, it is predominantly on the left-most side of said toe. This suggests that the dangling skin is somehow the result of my compensating for the diminished strength of my left leg by leaning my right foot just slightly inward, toward my left foot. Admittedly, it looks at times like my right foot’s big toe is developing calluses, although it never quite makes it. Perhaps that is part of the problem—calluses begin and are then rejected, and the toughened skin is slowly and painfully sloughed away.

Sucky.