I can thank the horses in my life for this question.
Over a year ago, I was tacking up a horse and wasn’t be too attentive. The sweet mare accidentally stepped on the top of my foot for a brief moment before my yelp and shove got her off of it. Although it didn’t hurt very much at the time and the pain faded almost immediately, I had a HUGE hoofprint-sized bruise on top of my foot for well over a week.
Then last week, my sweet mare accidentally stepped on me when I was being inattentive and leading her into the stall. She just barely hit my foot–but just nailed the toes. It hurt like she’d cut them off–just a screaming, searing, hobbling around mumbling, “Shit, shit, aw sssshhhhhiiiittt!!..” level of pain. But–no mark on me whatsover. No bruise, no cut, no dent, nothing.
Just the other day, I was being inattentive (notice a pattern?) and just plain stupid and fed her a treat the wrong way. As a result, she accidentally bit two of my fingertips–right in the middle of the fingernail, really. It was a white hot pain–I actually stuck my fingers in her water bucket to soothe them–and for the rest of the night I couldn’t use those two fingers. But again–not so much as a scratch to show for it all. Dammit, if I’m going to hurt like that, I want a cool bruise or scar to show off!
So…why is it that the tips of the extremities hurt so much worse when injured, but show much less damage?
This may or may not be relevant, but when I broke two bones in my foot I had some fantastic bruising - it looked like all the blood settled in the bendy areas in my foot. My foot actually looked like a zombie foot, with the mottled, multicolor bruising. It was quite nifty.
Anyway, the doctor told me that when you injure yourself in a “deep” way (like my broken foot), usually the blood from the swelling and whatnot will migrate itself to the surface, resulting in a technicolor bruise. Maybe that’s why you got a bruise from the foot-stomp and not so much from either the toes or the fingertips? The foot-stomp probably involved more surface area, more broken or crushed veins, and more chances for blood leakage.
As far as the pain goes, I think extremeties have more nerve endings. The lancet they use when they check your blood prior to donation hurts much worse in the fingertip than it does when they poke your earlobe instead.
it hurts more because of the pressure the blood puts between the skin and nail.
A normal bruise, which is just bleeding internally, can fill the join spaces and otherwise spread throughout an injured area.
An injury to a nail bed or area around it though leaves the blood with no place to go and it simply builds pressure.
You can relieve the pain almost immediatly by making a hole in the nail top. Emergency rooms use a small electric hot tip to melt through the top of the nail. Usually you will see a pretty good squirt when breaching the surface as the pressure is erlieved.
The above is also why toothaches hurt so much. Besides the normal irritation and swelling of an infection, the majority of the pain is caused by unrelieved pressure.
I know that fingers (especially fingertips) have way more nerves than most of your body, and are thus more sensitive to touch, temperature, pain, etc. It would make sense if toes worked the same way, given that a lot of the wiring in your hands and feet is similar, but that’s just a WAG.
Speaking as someone who’s broken nine toes, BTW, I can tell you that even if you’ve broken one (ie done serious damage), you can’t necessarily see anything on the surface. With most of them, I didn’t even bruise, even though it hurts like hell.
