Ouch, dammit; or: Why I'm peeved at my doctor

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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As some of you may remember, about a year ago I suffered a nice little injury in Sri Lanka after stepping on glass then walking through minefields for two weeks in the service of my country. That little episode in male stupidity (“I’m fine, I don’t need to see the doctor, pain don’t hurt none”) cost me three weeks hobbling around on a cane and screwing up my lower back muscles from the posture adaptation that the cane needed.

Well, the place on my left foor where the glass went in and penetrated a full centimeter has twinged on and off for the past year, and I had more than one doctor tell me that this was normal, and that scar tissue took a while to form and settle, and that due to the fact that there is constant pressure on your feet, these type of injuries can take a long time to heal.

Fast forward to two weeks ago,when I’m idly rubbing the bottom of my left foot and noticing that there’s a place that really twinges badly when it gets pressure on it. Being stupid and male (not necessarily mutually exclusive conditions), I decide to trim the callus down and see if this helps alleviate the pressure. Hmm, with the callus off, looks like there’s a little hole in my foot. I wonder if … naw, couldn’t be… just maybe, is there something left in there? Mind you, when I first got hurt, I dug out what I thought were all the foreign bodies in the wound site, as Sri Lanka is not a clean place and I didn’t want trench foot or any creeping awfuls infecting me.

But damn, it sure looks like there’s something in there, so off I go to the doctor last week, who says it’s likely just a plantar wart, and that if it keeps hurting, they’ll freeze it off. What about the pain and don’t you think we should open 'er up again, sez I. Nope, this kind of thing is common, says the doc, take advil for the pain of need be and you should be fine.

Yesterday morning, I decide to take a little more callus off with a pumice stone and am rewarded with screeching, grinding pain and that gritty, splintering feeling that only comes from glass shards. I take my medical kit that has scalpels and tweezers in it, and spend about two minutes figuring out that yep, there’s sumpin in there, and I now have the choice of going to the hospital, waiting two hours and recounting the story (in Spanish, btw) or I can just pull the fricking thing out. [Dennis Hopper] What do you do? [/Dennis Hopper] How big can it be, anyway?

One sharp yank later, I’m staring dumbfounded at a nice sharp hunk of glass about the size of my pinky fingernail. My exhortation of “Motherf*cker!” at that point would have done Sam Jackson proud and brought my wife downstairs quickly.

So now my foot is glass-free, no pain whatsoever and I have a souvenir from South Asia that I’ve been carrying around for over a year inside my body. On Monday, I’ll go in and see the doc and say 'Plantar wart my ass, Doc." I’m equal parts relieved to have it out and peeved that he didn’t take me more seriously.

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But in Spanish, right? “Verruga plantar mi asno, doc!”

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Good Lord, this thread was painful to read _

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Shove the thing right up in his face when you tell him what he missed. Hope you didn’t watch the blood off of it.

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Did that doctor even look at your foot? Did he understand that there had been a “shrapnel” splinter?

Planters warts hurt yes but gee, check the foot for splinters too.

::having pain flashbacks to all the splinters in my clumbsy youth and the damn planters wart I had “burned” off in 7th grade::

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I guess the doc looked but did not see, or wanted to get on with his day. He’s also given me Afrin and lozenges for what turned out to be a sinus infection, so I have my doubts about his bedside manner. I’m not happy with him, but very relieved to have that damn thing out of my foot. As I said to my wife yesterday, “It’s like my foot needed to take a whiz for a year.”

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i once had a splinter of glass work it’s way out of my knee 10 years after the original injury ! :eek:
it was a slightly painful lump, kind of like a zit, but then when i was playing with it, the point of the glass stuck out, and i was able to pull it the rest of the way with tweezers. fortunately it was shaped like a cat’s claw, so it came out relatively easily.

and then, 2 years after that, i started experiencing very sharp pain when i bent my knee, just like it was being cut. the first doctor (at my GPs practice) was OK. he was dubious but willing to acknowledge that it was possible, even though it didn’t seem likely. he ordered xrays, and i pointed out the glass shard to him. even though the mass was clearly moving over the patella, so not too deep, he referred me to a surgeon.

the surgeon on the other hand, i wanted to smack. he told me it couldn’t possibly be glass in my knee after so long. when i said i had seen the glass on my xray, he look at me like “what the hell where you doing looking at an xray !?” arrogant bastid. and he told me the he couldn’t fit me in for a week and a half. i told him that i was leaving in a couple of days to do a 500 mile bike ride, couldn’t he just do it there and then ? no, he needed to book an operating room, etc, etc.

so, back to the GP office i go. i got a different doctor. he agreed it couldn’t be too serious, as the mass moved freely over the patella, and called another surgeon who agreed to see me as soon as i could get there. now this guy was younger, listened to my story, let me show him where the glass was on my xray, and agreed that it should be no big deal to remove. and he did it right in his office there and then. and yes, i did go on to ride 500 miles on my bike the next week, and had the stitches out when i got back.

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It sounds to me like you need a new doctor. Do you have a choice?

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Yep, I know that feeling. About three years ago I had a lump on the back of my knee, which was diagnosed by two doctors as a Baker’s Cyst, probably caused by some kind of injury. Despite my seeing them about it repeatedly over the next eight months, they kept saying it would go away on its own.

Finally, an orthopedic specialist took a look at it, and within 10 minutes was writing out a referral to a cancer center where I got the news: malignant liposarcoma, aka fat cancer.

That was two years ago and I’m doing fine now, but I decided to pay them a visit to get a prescription for some jock itch medicine (this was the first time I’d been there in over two and a half years). As it turned out, my old doctor was available, so I decided to pay him a visit. The first thing out of his mouth was “so, how’s that cyst on your knee doing?” The pale-green shade his face went when I dropped the C-bomb was simply wonderful.

(both of the incompetent docs are GPs at the Tokyo Medical and Surgical Clinic, across the street from Tokyo Tower. If any Dopers in the Tokyo area are going there, I recommend looking elsewhere)

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Ouch! This thread actually made me cringe!

Glad you got the glass out.

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Same :frowning:

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Hmmm. On one hand, I understand your feelings entirely. On the other, being an emerg doc myself, I know that these foreign bodies that don’t show up on X-rays are pretty hard to detect, and pretty difficult to get out. Getting out a foreign body when you don’t know where it is can be like getting a needle out of a haystack, and digging around randomly can cause plenty of damage. The natural history of these things is usually that they eventually resurface. And if you do get something out, it’s hard to know that nothing remains - that everything is out. I always make a point of telling patients I do not know if something is still there, because patients tend to be very angry when something like this happens.

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Dr._P, you’re absoluetly right that it’s hard to tell if there are foreign bodies in there, but the key part of your post is that you * tell* people if you’re not sure there’s something remaining. That’s what’s peeving me about this doctor (who is the official physician for the Embassy, btw). Not only did he not say that there was a possibility of foreign bodies, he dismissed it entirely and said in a voice that discounted all other possibilities that it was 100%, no foolin, something else.

On the plus side, I walked for nearly an hour yesterday without the slightest twinge of pain…