You Were Warned.

But in case you missed the memo, I'm posting before and after pictures of Justin's toenail removal today. However, first I'm going to post a picture of my fabulous new haircut. This serves two purposes: A) I can show off my fabulous new haircut and B) If you don't want to view Justin's gruesome toe pictures you can just avoid scrolling down and pretend that all that there is here is a great new haircut pic.

This is my new curly hair. Weirdly, I can wear it down without feeling like I'm growing my own wool sweater during the sweltering summer months. I'm assuming that it's because there is air in between the layers of curls. If someone had told me this sooner, I might not have worn a pony tail every day for the last 2 years.

This is your last chance not to look at bloody toe pics.



This is Justin's toe before his surgery. You can see that it's ingrown on both sides, almost to the point of being a triangle. It's also really really thick, about half an inch at the end from the curling and callous that formed to protect the toe from the nail.

This is right after they gave Justin the gigantic shots to numb his toe. (Which didn't work.) I'm not exactly sure why they put this weird envelope on his foot, except that maybe they didn't want him to see the blood coming from his gigantic needle wounds. He peeked anyway. I wanted to take pictures of the doctor actually giving him the shots, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have liked that. I also didn't get to take pics during the actual surgery.
This is me in the cap and mask that they made me wear so that I could go in with Justin while they did his toe. When I asked if I could go in and watch the doctor acted like it was a weird thing to request, but they have a chair in there for people to sit in and watch so it obviously isn't that unusual.

This is the front view of Justin's toe wrapped up in the bandages after surgery. The gross yellow stuff is the betadine they used to wash his foot. The wrapping is almost cartoonish. You can see that just an hour or so after he got home he had already bled through all that wrapping and onto the ace bandage. We had to add even more gauze a few hours later.

These are from yesterday as I unwrapped Justin's toe so that we could clean it and re-wrap. You can see that he bled through something like 30 layers of gauze.





This this the big pile of gauze that we took off of Justin's foot. This isn't actually all of it, we had to soak some of it off so that it didn't start bleeding again and I forgot to add that to the pile before I took the picture.



And here is Justin's toe minus all the dressing. It's all white and wrinkly from being soaked in blood for two days we cleaned it up and now it looks more like the last picture which is a relief. It's stressful for Justin to have his toe looking like this and I'm pretty sure that it's more than he bargained for. And frankly, I'm pretty surprised too that it's turned into such an ordeal. My sister had both of her big toenails removed while we were in high school, and I don't remember it being like this at all. I'm almost sorry that I convinced Justin to get this fixed, but I know that in the long run this is much better than them having to take his whole toe off.
This is what it looks like now, much less scary. We have to unwrap it and soak and re-dress it every day this week, and on Thursday we go back to the doctor for a follow up. Eventually it will heal and there won't be a weird scab or anything after maybe a month, I hope...When he's completely healed I will post a picture of Justin's naked toe.
And finally, here's Dr. Maybe, who wasn't there for any of this torture, but wanted to be included anyway.