She is. RN, BSN, CFCS (Certified Foot Care Specialist). She worked at a wound center before hiring on at a home health company. She left the home health company to start her own foot care business. The first couple of years were rough. First, she needed to find clients. Then COVID hit, She’s built up her client list, and is often scheduled a month or more out. Income is a far cry from when she was with the home health company. Since she sees people in their homes and it’s a good-sized county, she only sees two or three patients per day (though she has seen four or five when there are ‘two-fers’ – two people in the same home). She gets many referrals from her previous employer, as they do not have a foot care nurse on their staff and don’t want to hire one. She loves her patients, she loves her work, and she loves being her own boss.
ETA: Diabetic foot care requires an RN with the necessary training and certification. At least in this state, non-certified RNs and other caregivers are not supposed to do foot care for diabetics. Wifey, RN had one patient who lost a toe when someone (a neighbour?) trimmed his toenails and nicked him. When a new patient mentions they have diabetes, she tells them that an RN needs to do the job, and why.
How sure are you that it’s actually a splinter of glass in your foot?
I ask because I get ‘hair splinters’ - animal hairs work their way into a skin pore and hurt like hell. I had one yesterday after I had been cutting pieces of glass and I assumed a stray bit of glass had somehow got into my shoe, but it was just a hair - usually I need a magnifying glass to even see the protruding end of the hair and grab it with tweezers.
Went to local walk-in medical care shop. (When did those first appear? Future OP…)
They had x-rays, surprisingly, which MD insisted. Long sucker. Lateral, angled and top down=plantar 2-D shots can’t be correlated as to location between edges of foot, which surprised me but I get it .
Even if she had located it exactly, said she wouldn’t dig it up and out. Scheduled me for podiatrist for tomorrow who first can do an ultrasound as well. Also a tetanus shot, no doubt my nth since my first one still valid (eight years?).
It’s about 1/2-long and normal to sole and skinny jagged. Digital pix-or-it-didn’t-happen not attached because I can’t find my damn external drive.
I asked what the podiatrist will probably do and she said
[Use] sterilized equipment, topical antiseptics, good lighting and magnification as necessary, knowledge of anatomy to avoid doing ancillary damage, topical anesthetic if it is necessary to do any actual incision, careful technique to avoid driving the foreign matter deeper into the body, post-removal assessment to assure that tissue is healthy and no sign of infection, tetanus booster. That sort of thing.
Stranger
Leo
PS: Hi @Mangetout! It’s fun being back and meeting old friends. Ditto @DSeid. Ditto @Quadcop_the_Mercotan and @Johnny_L.A! And Stranger if I haven’t already…
Mod request in for title fix. You’re right about my petard self-hoist (recent post of mine). Next time I’ll add “…Especially on Title Pages and the Like.”
One of my special cover issues at IEEE was on anti-ballistic missile defenses, and the spine (those were the days when we had enough advertising to actually have spines) read “…missles.” The art-director had sign-off on the cover copy I submitted, and apologized like crazy, but I still feel bad about the whole thing, even though I had no way to check it pre-print.
I confess to having done minor surgery on myself. I’m good with knives…
I recommend you use bleach, not fire, for home sterilization of metal instruments. Heating a needle or even tweezers ruins the temper, and it might bend. I recommend that whoever looks for the splinter be someone who can clearly see the area. So probably not you for your foot. And i recommend strongly against digging around in the foot, even if you aren’t diabetic, because get take a lot of abuse and wounds there are problematic. So, if you can see or feel the splinter, maybe get a friend or family to pull it out with carefully washed hands and sterilized tweezers before going to urgent care, so as not to keep driving it further in when you travel there. But then go for wound care, since you have diabetes. And if it’s not easy to remove, try really hard to keep your weight off it until you can get to a professional.
[Moderating]
Even though I’m not an IMHO mod, I took the liberty of editing the title (changing “match” to “needle”) at the OP’s request. In the future, the better way to deal with this is to flag the post, so the forum’s moderators can see it.
This doesn’t sound like a DIY job to me either, diabetic or not.
Several years ago, my mother stepped on a sliver of wood (IIRC, a dropped toothpick) and she finally had to go to a podiatrist, who also used ultrasound to locate and remove it. There’s also a podiatrist who comes to the senior center where she and my dad often have lunch, once or twice a month, and he does free foot checks and nail trims for anyone who needs them. I’ve mentioned here before that Dad doesn’t have all of his toenails, due to recalcitrant toenail fungus, but he hands the DPM a $5 bill each time anyway.