Dec 2025
This morning, before my shower, I began my ritual of protecting the bandage on my left foot from getting wet while I shower. My vascular surgical people recommend that I wear compression stockings to hasten healing, so frankly, I haven’t seen much of my left foot in the last eighty days. I only see it for the ten minutes or so that it takes to change the dressing and apply the various wound care voodoo creams before I pull on thick ambulatory compression stockings which remian in place until the next dressing change.
To shower, I pull a latex glove over my foot. Unsurprisingly, they don’t make latex socks, at least not at the store I go to for medical supplies. It looks a bit ridiculous, but it works, or rather, two of them do. One has to double-glove feet to keep them dry because one stands on them, apparently.
Usually, I glove-up my foot with the old bandage intact to shower first. I wash the foot with a special soap and change the dressing after the shower by dangling it over the edge of the tub. This morning, my old bandage fell off when I removed my compression stocking. It had been adhering to the wound surface because of the various fluid excreted by the wound. This morning, the bandage was dry and appeared to be new despite the fact it had been on my foot for almost twenty-four hours.
I looked at my foot and the wound is down to a narrow sliver of scab, like someone took a dark red crimson pen and drew a line down the front of my foot where my toe used to be. The wound bed was dry.
It doesn’t need a bandage, not even to shower.
I looked down at a stoneware crab garden statue I have next to my shower and said “Crabby,” my name for this statue, “this shit is done.” Tears immediately filled my eyes, and since I was sitting alone, I just let the river of emotions crash into my valley of loss. I sobbed like I’d just lost a child, but since I was alone, that didn’t stop me from stepping into the shower.
The shower washed the tears down my face, I’m not sure exactly when they stopped, but when I stepped out of the shower for the first time in 81 days without having to gingerly manage stepping on something clean I feel drained, empty of toxins, the tears had washed me clean inside. I regained something, on December 12, that I lost the twenty-first night of September, as the song goes–my unbandagedspan.
I am unbandaged just in time for today’s lower limb sonogram studies to see if there’s something that can be done with a catheter guided by a surgeon to improve my situation in my feet. The answer will probably be “no, you have microvascular disease” but it would be irresponsible for me not to seek that determination.
Now I have two big toes, two little toes, and one each of the middle toes, third and fourth on the left, second on the right. I can’t ignore the fact that this very pattern is the optimal one for losing toes sequentially. The first and fifth toes are the most important for balance, and I have them both. Given the choice, I’d part with the fourth toe on the left foot next, it is really just in the way of the third and fifth toes now, but that’s not how this works. I’ll lose whichever one is traumatized next.
This collision with toe fragility was six years after my first one, right before covid hit. One might be inclined to predict that I’m good for another half-decade of a largely unbandaged lifestyle, but that’s not how this works either. I really don’t know, no one does.
I consider myself emotionally intelligent, self-aware, and perhaps too introspective. I was surprised by this burst dam of emotions around unbandagement. This was bothering me so much I hid it from myself. This means something to me.
So I share it with you.