A Visit to the Doctor

My already abnormal thumb decided to get infected when I picked at a hangnail a couple of weeks back. This is not something I do often and after this experience, it’s not something I’m likely to do again. Since then, it looks like my thumb is trying to grow another thumb next to the nail. I would take a picture of this but I can’t stand looking at it- through a camera or otherwise. That’s part of the reason why I keep it wrapped in a band-aid. The other reason is because it just about launches me into space when I touch it.

This infection finally got bad enough that last week, I decided to go to the doctor and have it looked at- even though I knew what the end result was going to be. But I went anyway- my second visit to the doctor’s in as many days.

After waiting the standard nineteen and a half minutes in the waiting room, I was led into the doctor’s office by someone I assumed to a nurse. She weighed me (overweight), took my blood pressure (too high) and led me into the closet they call “The Doctor’s Office”. She asked me what the problem was and I explained to her about my thumb. It was clear from her expresion, or lack thereof, she wasn’t grasping the full impact of my ailment. This changed when I pulled away the shroud of tape and gauze and held up the specimen for her perusal.

I don’t know what they teach these alleged nurses in medical school but apparently they aren’t exposed to anything quite as hideous as my infected thumb. When I unveiled this aberration, she recoiled in barely concealed horror. All she could do was avert her eyes, stand up, inform me the the doctor would be right in and then make a beeline out of the office for the the nurses station, where I can only assume she spent the remainder of the day disinfecting both her hands and her eyes before heading home to face a night of restless sleep and feverish dreams.

The doctor must have been prepped on what to expect because when she entered, she had an almost unnatural calm about her- the kind a person gets when mentally repeating things like, “Think happy thoughts…think happy thoughts.” Then again, I’ve heard that she's been having personal problems.

She took one look at my thumb and said, “Oh yeah, that’s…” and then she said some long medical term that meant absolutely nothing to me. Still, I nodded knowingly, just like I do when my mechanic tells me what’s wrong with my car and I have no idea what he’s talking about. I made a mental note to try to remember the term she used for the infection in the unlikely event that I would look it up when I got home.

The doctor got up and went over to the medicine cabinet where she got out what looked like an X-Acto knife and a little packet of what turned out to be ointment. She gripped my thumb about as far away as possible from the festering mass, told me not to look, and sliced into the part of my thumb that is apparently somehow connected to the area a little above my right nostril but just below my right eye- which is where it felt like the tip of the Exacto knife was trying to poke through. This was about the point where I forgot the term she used for the infection.

The doctor slathered some ointment on the wound and wrapped a bandage around my now quivering thumb and told me to spend the next couple of days soaking it in warm water. I left the office pretty confident that we both knew that I would be back. But I was pretty proud of the fact that I neither screamed, cried, or wet myself- at least until I got back to my car.

Over the next several days, I spent an inordinate amount of time with my thumb stuck in an old pill bottle that I filled with warm water. The only discernible effect this seemed to have had was to make my thumb even more pale and wrinkled than it was before, and thus, make it even more hideous (think: old, wrinkly Elephant Man).

So, I’m sitting here, nearly a week after the doctor's appointment and nearly two weeks after the infection first appeared, trying to figure out what to do. My thumb is still masked from view and while that’s not quite half the battle, it accounts for something. I think about that X-Acto knife and I’m thinking that I might just give the pill bottle and warm water one more day.