could this be good news?

I'm kicking myself for not having taken a picture, so I'm afraid you're stuck having to learn this story via my humble prose. Last night, before going to bed, I made the random decision to bandage up my toe with a single, simple bandage—not the usual, heavy-duty nonsense. I woke up this morning, and as has become the ritual since last October, the first thing I did was to look at my right big toe for signs of leakage in the bandage. Over the past month, the leakage has dwindled to a mere dot or splotch representing, at most, only a few drops of blood or fluid escaping over the course of a few hours. Well... today, when I looked at the toe bandage's exterior, I saw nothing. Intrigued and a little afraid, I gingerly peeled the bandage off my toe, fully expecting to see a wan little bit of leakage in the bandage's absorbent pad.

Nothing.

I don't know what this means, to be honest. I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean that I'm completely healed. It does, however, mean that I've finally had my first night, since this whole mess began, without any leakage whatsoever. What's doubly perplexing is that this reduction in leakage is happening a few days after I made the risky decision to clip away a lot of the callus that had built up around the toe wound. The night I did that clipping, I was worried that I'd discover the true size of the wound, and that it'd be a lot wider than I'd thought. As it turns out, the actual wound is pretty small now, and the clipping I did was apparently beneficial, allowing the wound to heal "flatter," so to speak, instead of becoming a cavernous divot that gets closed off at the top, i.e., not really healing at all.

Something to remember as well: I checked my bandage after a night's sleep, i.e., I'd been off my feet for several hours. Earlier in the evening around 9 p.m., when I'd changed from the day's big bandages to the night's single, regular bandage, there'd been some leakage, which is normal for where I am now in the healing process. Tentative conclusion: any amount of walking is still likely to produce leakage. More optimistically, though, a night without any leakage is a first: even after sleeping, after being off my feet for several hours, I normally see some amount of leakage through my bandage every morning. To see none is nothing short of revolutionary. Here's hoping I've reached a point where "leakless nights" become more common. And then, I can hope, I'll start having "leakless days." Several leakless days in a row, and I'll cautiously pronounce myself healed.

So my prediction of being totally healed by some time in July might prove true.

Fingers and tentacles crossed.