toe update (post-rain edition)

Things are looking kind of rough and ugly tonight. My shoes were still damp from the previous day's rainy walk, but this is definitely a bloodstain:

Peeling off the sock to look at the bandage isn't much better:

A view of the wound and the bandage's interior:

The white stuff in the wound is just loose skin that I brushed off.

A closer focus on the wound:

And a wee bit closer: 

By wiping at the wound, I was able to clear out a bit of the detritus and get a closer look at the wound's opening. With the shoes still being wet, the same cleaning action as before occurred, and a good bit of the darkness around the wound's opening cleared up. After wiping away at the dead skin around the wound's opening, I saw the opening itself widened a bit, and the interior of the wound still looks somewhat deep, so I might not be as close to healed as I'd hoped.

That said, the wound doesn't strike me as looking all that bad, and despite the definitely increased leakage brought on by the distance walking, the wound feels as though it can stand long walks. A few months back, when the wound looked a lot worse, that wasn't the case. I did an 18K walk to Bundang, and there was pain associated with the wound—pain that penetrated my foot's numbness. There's none of that now. The foot feels healed, almost as if it were back to its pre-October 2022 state. It's obviously not healed, so I shouldn't be too cavalier, but it does feel a lot better, and after two days in a row of walking around 17 kilometers, it isn't nearly as bad as I thought it might get.

So: action item! Do I continue my distance walking, now that I've restarted it, or do I lay off and let the wound heal the rest of the way in peace and quiet? That's a toughie because, frankly, I think my mind had been craving some good, long walks for a while, and I'd been going quietly crazy without them while I sat on my ass for months. So psychologically, continuing to walk feels like the right thing to do. But with the amount of leakage seen on tonight's walk, taking it easy might be advisable. I think the compromise solution is to keep doing long walks, but maybe only twice or three times a week.

I have a long walk that I might be doing with my former student this weekend (he hasn't said yes to walking yet, so this might not happen)—the 26K walk to Hanam City. I could possibly do that walk with my student, then lay off walking until Wednesday the following week. We'll play it by ear and see how things go. For all I know, my student's family might be too busy touring around Korea to squeeze in a six-hour-long evening walk. I might be asking too much, and I'm not sure the entire family would want to do such a walk, anyway. I'm betting that, if I do walk, it'll be just me and my student. He's a multitalented athlete (this includes distance running, I think), so a walk like this ought to be nothing for him.

More on this later.