interesting foot update

I was delighted to come home from a day at the office (I'm still not distance walking) to discover only minor discoloration of my bandages and no red/pink fluid anywhere. There was a little bit of weeping from the damaged skin, but it had gone way down. Quite a difference from this past Friday night. We may have entered a new phase of healing.

First pic: you can see the two layers of bandaging that I use. Sorry about the collected hairs; I thought I'd plucked all of the hairs off, but I would have needed much brighter, stronger lighting to see them, so here we are. Nasty hairs aside, note how little discoloration there is on the two layers of bandages. (Note, too, that I clipped out all of the bloody callus on my right big toe.) This minimal discoloration is a good sign.

hairy hairs

In the next pic, below, I've peeled back the bandages to reveal the damaged skin, which seems to have healed even more since Friday. Note how thick the healing epidermal skin is next to the still-raw, exposed dermis. Even after all of this heals, I'll be Leukotaping and maybe even gauzing the area up just to be sure this problem doesn't return. I'll also be taping up the big toe now that I've taken away that nasty-looking callus. And other areas will be taped up as well since I've already found some new friction spots that have appeared thanks to my new shoes (found while wearing the shoes sockless), which I'm still getting used to, and which still need to undergo some distance testing once I've healed enough.

with the bandages peeled back

In this final pic below—maybe you can see this, and maybe you can't—I have a closeup of the exposed dermis, which seems to be clouding over, i.e., there may already be the first tentative bits of new epidermis reaching across that opening so as to seal everything up again. I hope that that's what's happening, anyway. It could be that I'm just seeing things.

In the meantime, the care routine continues: bandages are changed twice daily, and before the second change, done in the evening when I get back from work, I still soak my foot in Epsom salt. While I eventually need to expose the new skin to air and let it dry out and toughen, the salt soaks help with the healing and have a slight antibiotic effect, purging the exposed area of bacteria. (I ran out of my prescribed antibiotics this past Sunday; I might go get more.) On random days, I also rub the skin down with something painful, like rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. This isn't like the situation with the diabetic ulcer from a couple years ago; I'm not impeding any healing because the dermis isn't broken. Besides: after the salt-soak and the alcohol/peroxide treatments, I always pat the foot dry before applying new bandages.

Does the dermis look to be clouding over to you? It doesn't look as moist and raw as it did when I'd just gotten back from Daegu. Behold:

I think healing has reached the final stage.

Expect another report this Friday if not before.