Well, my toe looks somewhat better.
I had gotten a line of something along the left side of the nail, as if I'd dropped something on it, or bumped something. It was pretty thin, but over the course of about ten days it spread to cover about a third of the nail. I was more than a little freaked about it, since, for a couple of reasons, I'm really sensitive about my toes. I did the usual web searching, and what I found was that it was probably a toe fungus, which is pretty common -- except that it didn't match up with some of the classic indications on presentation. I was still willing to think yeah, whatever, but it turned out, on one site, that an alternative explanation is a form of skin cancer, which really got my attention, because it was my inattention to exactly that which ended up in me having outpatient surgery a few years ago. On the other hand, skin cancers don't pop up that way -- they start as dots or bumps, and progress slowly. Still, its a scary thing, so I went to the local doc shop, when they came to the same conclusion -- probably a fungus, but not classic presentation, lets take a scraping and see if we can get a culture grown, obtw, you might want to talk to a dermatologist just in case. Well, that didn't do much to relieve my mind, so when I got home, I got, shall we say, aggressive with the nail clippers, to the point where I'd removed about the upper left fifth or so of the nail. And to my surprise, the gunk came off with the nail. There's still a goodly amount there, but the combination of removing part of the nail, and poking gently until the remaining nail got about half of it. I don't know that this fixes it; it could still be fungus, in which case whats left will repopulate, what fun; it could be that I somehow managed to bruise the nail bed, and this was dried blood (how I could do that without remembering it, dunno); but its probably not skin cancer, which was my major concern.
Speaking of fungus and cancer, I wonder how the politicians are doing today?
