comparison

Don't look if you're squeamish, but I wanted to do a before/after because it's been a bit more than a week since I started my new toe-care regimen. First, the horror:

January 23, 2023... I keep expecting a worm or a spider to crawl out.

In the above grisly pic, you see a ton of callus ringing the wound, and the wound itself looks pretty cavernous although, as you can see, it's also pretty bloodless thanks to my constant cleaning regime at the time (regular clean wipe, alcohol swab, peroxide-soaked Q-tip).

One of the first things the doc did at the hospital was to whittle away most of the callus. That immediately made the wound look better, and I suspect it also gave any potential pathogens less of a cavernous space in which to settle and cause mischief. My new regimen no longer involves loading my toe wound up with astringent chemicals like isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide: the doc prescribed what is basically a burn cream (loaded with silver particles; silver has antibiotic properties) plus some oral antibiotics. Below is a shot of my toe that I took tonight, and it's quite a contrast from the above January 23 shot:

March 31, 2023... there's hope that this might close up eventually.

Note, too, how bloodless my toe currently is. I barely had to wipe it clean tonight. Oh, it's still bleeding: I still get blood-dots on my sock. But the bleeding is now greatly reduced, and while I'm not totally positive, it does look as though the wound is starting to close. I've also been more or less on the Newcastle diet again for about a week (9 weeks to go), the long-term effect of which is to get some circulation back in my feet.

I'm seeing my old doc this coming Monday; I'm going to recommend that he continue to prescribe me the meds prescribed by Samseong Hospital. While I'm not a fan of taking those meds, they represent one way to get my numbers back in order. Get the numbers low enough, and the doc might start taking meds away as I grow out of them.

So that second pic seems to show some progress. I go back to the hospital on April 6, and we'll see what the doc has to say about how far I've come.