Let's Talk: Ingrown toenails

Greetings!

For this weeks topic, lets talk ingrown toenails 

What is it? and what to expect. 

Ingrown toenail is basically your nail growing into parts of the the surrounding skin/soft tissue. This can cause variety of symptoms such as pain, inflammation and swelling. Most people recover from episodes of ingrown toenails by clipping their nails straight, wearing comfortable shoes and keeping their feed clean and dry. However for some cases surgical intervention is required such as chronic ingrown toenail. 

Possible causes:

- ill fitting foot wear

- acute trauma to the area

- cutting toenails too short and rounding 

- infection 

- diabetes/neurological conditions 

Surgical treatment:

Now the reason I wanted to talk about ingrown toenails for this weeks health topic was because I myself got the opportunity to do a partial nail removal of an ingrown toenail. It was one of my first experiences of minor office surgical procedures. I will walk through exactly what I did and what I learned from that experience. 

The patient that had an ingrown toenail came to the clinic I was working at for the National Guard. This patient had a previous injury of her toe and as it was in the process of healing she ended up stubbing her toe while working. She was unfortunately not able to give it much attention and in a few days her pain had turned pretty severe and infection had started to set in on one of the corners. The PA I was working under examined the patients toe and decided that a partial toenail removal was the best course of treatment. I was instructed to use Lidocaine with EPI and preform a digital block which is a procedure where about 1-3CC are injected distal to the effected toe circumferentially in order to temporarily block pain. I was then instructed to use a blunt flat object to insert underneath the patients nail and lift it from the nail bed. I was then shown where to but the mail in half and used forceps to pull the nail off the crucial. I then cleaned up the area and bandaged up the patients toe. 

I learned a lot during this procedure and even though a partial/full nail removal is not needed to most cases, having the knowledge of how to do it, is another tool in my belt for the future

Pretty kitty with no real responsibilities 

Source 

Staff. Ingrown toenails. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/ingrown-toenails/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20355908