I was trying to think of something fun to write about. Nothing came to mind, so I’m going to share a little story about dead toenails. Have you ever done something that caused your toenail to turn black, and then eventually fall off?
I’ve had a few experiences during my life where I’ve lost a toenail or two. The first time I can remember was back in high school. I was with a bunch of friends at a neighborhood swimming pool. We were doing flips and can openers and things off the diving board for hours. Well when I went to get out of the pool after one of my turns, I swam over to the ladder. I grabbed the ladder and pulled myself over. As I pulled myself over I put one foot on the wall of the pool, and the other on the bottom step. I stood up on that step.
As soon as I stood up I realized what I had done. My weight on the ladder caused it to swing back over to the wall. The point where it hit the wall was right where my big toe was still on the wall. My reaction was to pull my foot loose, which probably wasn’t the best reaction. I was in serious pain and bleeding all over the place. That was the end of swimming for that day. I still have a ridge down the middle of my left big toe toenail from how it grew back in months later.
The next time I remember losing a couple of toenails happened years later. I took a group of scouts on a great hike up the mountain. The boots I wore were my construction boots. I didn’t have any hiking boots at the time. That was not a good idea. First of all they were heavy, but that alone would have been just fine. The problem was on the way down the mountain. I think it was a 9 mile hike down, and the boots were steel toed. It never crossed my mind that I probably should have tightened them more before heading down.
Soon after we started going down I could feel my toes jamming into the steel toes of the boots. Every step caused pain. We had started the hike in the middle of the afternoon, so we were on our way down in the middle of the night. I had no choice but to push through. The next day both of my middle toe toenails were completely black. a couple of months later they fell off and started growing in replacements. That was a long night.
The picture I had for this post is my current situation. This time I wasn’t even aware that I was killing my toenails when it was happening. These are a result of Thanksgiving day football. I wore the same shoes I’ve used for that for several years. I’m not sure what was different this year, but here I am again. This time I didn’t kill the entire nail, so I think there is a chance the nail will just grow out with clean new nails behind them. We’ll see.
