21 September 1999

All right, to get this out of the way, several people have complained that I haven't bothered to mention the new pictures in the photo album. Karen has been sending me the pictures she took three at a time, and I was going to wait until I got the whole set before mentioning it here, but my readers demand immediate updates! So there you go. Since the list was getting sortof long, pictures that have been up for less than a week are marked with a red New! under their thumbnails. My appointment with the foot doctor yesterday for minor surgery went pretty well. They stuck me in a standard examining room for a while because someone was in the room they use for minor surgeries already. I waited there (thank goodness I'd taken a book with me) for about twenty minutes before they brought me to the correct room. The doctor came in and set up a little screen so I couldn't see my foot, and then we had the only painful part of the procedure - the anasthetic shots. I like this doctor a lot - he always tells me what he's going to do, when he's going to do it, why he's going to do it, and what I can expect. I told him I was nervous (who likes shots?) and he kept up a running patter while doing them. "Okay, the first shot is going to be here (wiping with the alcohol pad at the inside base of the toe) and the second one here (wiping alcohol over the outside base). Those will sting a bit, and then we'll wait for the stuff to take effect, and then you shouldn't feel the rest of them. Ready? You'll feel a little pinch as I put the needle in... (pinprick) and now I just need to find the right spot... (pinching sensation) Okay, now I'm going to count to three, and when I get to three, you'll feel a sting. Okay? Ready? One... Two... Three! (bee-sting sensation on the inside of my toe, and he puts the needle down on the tray I can see. I wiggle my foot, which seems to help the stinging sensation subside. He picks up the other needle.) Now the other spot. Ready? Okay? Pinch... (pinprick) And one... two... three! (bee-sting, more wiggling) How's that feel? Okay? Now the worst is over." He went away for five minutes while the anasthetic took effect (and I've had numb lips and mouth before from novocaine, but never a numb toe before and it felt really weird) and then came back and gave me shots in those two spots again, but I barely felt anything. Then he gave me two more shots, on the front and back of the toe, and those stung a little, all the way down to the "knuckle" of the toe. The doctor said that was probably because that was the origination point of the nerve branch. He sprayed iodine solution all over my toe, and went away for another five minutes or so to make sure the anasthetic was fully in force. When he came back, he had a wrapped package that unfolded to reveal rubber gloves, a scalpel, and some small forceps. I got nervous again, wondering if I'd feel tugging or anything. He warned me that he was going to put a rubber tourniquet on my toe, and if I felt something dangling down, it wasn't my toe, it was the end of the tourniquet or the clamp. He picked up the scalpel and did something on the other side of the screen. "Did that hurt?" "Did what hurt?" He just smiled and said, "Good, the anasthetic's taken effect." How peculiar. The last time I had foot surgery, the surgery was a little more involved (though still fairly minor) and they'd numbed the whole foot. The first time the doctor had come in (not the same doctor) to test the anasthetic, he'd poked me with the scalpel on the bottom of my foot and I'd shrieked and yanked my foot away, causing the nurse to yell at me for making her re-do all the disinfectant. They gave me another shot. When he'd come back and tried again (this time with warning, for petesake) it felt like being poked with the eraser end of a pencil. This time, I didn't feel anything. At all. Not even a tugging on the surrounding skin. So I sat there, wondering when he was going to actually start working, and he's talking to me about the Y2K problems he's having with his fairly old home computer. He actually knows what a "BIOS" is, so I'm trying to help him diagnose his problem, and wondering when he's going to start working. Since the anasthetic test, he hadn't touched my foot, except to fiddle with the tourniquet clamp, which I can feel with the next toe. A minute or so later, I look up and he's taking the blade out of his scalpel! I hadn't felt a thing! (I like my doctor.) After that, he applies the whatever-it-is to the base of the nail that kills it and makes sure it won't grow back in that spot for exactly three minutes (I saw him watching his watch) and then he bandages up my toe, takes down the screen, and gives me a cute green foam slipper with a happy-face on it to wear home, since I can't get my shoe on with this bandage. I made an appointment to come back next week for them to look it over, and hobbled out. I stopped at the CVS on my way home to give them my painkiller prescription and pick up the gauze and iodine solution my post-surgical instructions listed. And (while I was waiting for the prescription) about half a dozen other things. ::grin:: I like the CVS. My post-surgical instructions say I shouldn't get my toe wet. I thought this morning that I would take a gallon-sized Zip-loc bag and tape it around my ankle, and since I was wearing a sock, that would soak up whatever happened to leak past the tape. Would've worked, too, except I forgot to tape shut the huge gaping hole in the bag caused by folding the edge over. ::sigh:: Oh, well. I'll try it again tomorrow, I guess. This morning on the radio, they were discussing an item that's up for vote in Virginia Beach this November: whether the city should spend the money to build a light train from downtown to the oceanfront. The DJs thought it would get shot down because people aren't going to want to give up their cars. Some guy called in (he seemed to be attached to the train project) to defend it, and while he made a lot of good points, the one I had to complain about was that he said "Triple-A says that it costs about 51 cents a mile to drive your car - including cost, insurance, maintenance, and gas - and the train will be at most $1.50 each trip. If you drive more than six miles a day, it's worth taking the train!" Idiot. He completely didn't take into account the fact that most local people will have to continue to keep a car anyway, so they're not saving on anything except gas, and that the vast majority of people will have to drive their cars to the train stations anyway, so they're not even saving that much. Don't get me wrong - I think the area needs some sort of mass transportation, and it might as well be a train. Once they get feeds laid to all the major areas (not just Downtown to the oceanside - and the guy listed about four other feeds in the works) then it'll be a big boon to the area. With a well-planned train system, the Norfolk/VA Beach area could even hope to become a real city some day. But I hate listening to illogical and ill-planned arguments. It makes me want to jump the other way just in reaction. (I can think of at least two other examples off the top of my head. If you're really curious as to what they are, mail me and I'll tell you.)