Pumpkin in my toe.

On Monday morning I was on the patio cleaning up because nine kids were scheduled to come over that afternoon to play.

It needs to be said that while on the patio cleaning I was walking around bare foot. I've never been much for shoes, unless they are boots or heels for a girls/date night of course, but day to day I'm a no shoe wearing sandles if I have to kinda gal.

And in very typical Melissa fashion, as I was walking around bare foot I stubbed my toe.

I have this problem see....I stub my toes a lot. That happens when you don't wear shoes. It is a miracle that they have not become deformed over the years from scar tissue building up for repeated beatings.

You'd think that after all these years of repeated toe stubbings I would be used to the pain incurred from them. But no. Not in the least. There is something about stubbing your toe that makes you think you are enduring the greatest degree of suffering you've ever experienced. (Why then I laugh at other people when I see them stub there toe and curse from the pain....I don't know. I gather I'm a little off. )

Okay so this time when I stubbed my toe, I did not stub it on a door, or corner piece of furniture, or chair leg....I stubbed it on a pumpkin.

Blasted thing.

Stupid pumpkin was just sitting there, waiting for me to run into it. Being busy cleaning and distracted from it's position right in front of my nose, it's skin not being a bright enough orange for me take proper note of it's existence and potential for disaster.....I slammed my toes into the side of it, taking off the pumpkin skin as I dragged my foot away.

It needs to be said, that stubbing your toe on a pumpkin is comparable in pain to a normal toe stubbing. Definitely hurts.

But, stubbing your toe on a pumpkin and having the skin of that pumpkin forcefully shoved under your toe nails, and not just the tippy top of the nail either, but shoved all.the.way down to the bottom of your toe nail bed.....

is comparable to child birth. Or something equally as painful. Torture perhaps.

It was a NINE on the 0-10 pain scale you see at the doctor's office. Zero being no pain, 10 being worst pain you've ever experienced. 9. Maybe 9.5. For reals. Pumpkin in the toe hurts.

It hurt so bad I started crying.

I hobbled my way inside the house, doing the lamaze breathing I never had a chance to do while pregnant to try to mindfully manage the pain.

I sat at the table and looked at the damage.....

my smallest three toes had orange crap sticking out the top of my nails.

I hobble to the bathroom and got the tweezers and successfully manage to remove all the pumpkin I could see. I figured it would be like a splinter, hurts real bad while in the skin, but once removed, immeditately feels better.

That did not happen.

Which led me to believe that I had pumpkin way down deep and the only hope for removing it would be to amputate my toe nail.

Oh mercy Jesus, why couldn't I have been wearing shoes.

There was no way I could do toe nail removal surgery on myself, so I chugged some ibuprofen and waited till Isaak got home from work. I can't believe I survived that long.

But, luckily, by the afternoon I had 11 kids at the house to watch and distract me and soon thereafter Isaak came home from work and I had him examine my toe.

He could see orange down further under neath the nail, but in order to get to it he had to cut the nail down half way, to the middle of the nail bed. And once he cut the nail down shorter than it's suppose to go, I noticed he stopped, and sat for minute staring at my foot. I had my face buried in the couch cushions when I heard him say,

"You do realize that you have pumpkin coming out of your toes."

Yeah.

"You realize you stub your toes more than anyone I know."

Yeah.

"You might want to consider wearing shoes sometimes."

Yeah. It hurts as bad as child birth.

"You had c-sections."

It hurts like my c-sections.

(It may not look like much, but don't be deceived, it's the little things that hurt the worst.  That little bit of pumpkin had me contemplating cutting off my own toe for relief. I figured it would be comparable to that guy who cut off his own arm when he got trapped while hiking, and in the end I could at least have a movie made from my experience.)

So Isaak then took the tweezers and pulled out the remaining pumpkin he could see.

Ahhhhh, sweet relief. For like, 3 minutes. And then it started hurting again. Just as bad as it did before! Burning, throbbing, feels like my toes gonna fall off kinda pain! What the heck?! Pumpkin out=no more pain I thought! Except I still had some major pain action goin' on. Isaak assured me that this was a different kind of pain....the healing kind of pain when a foreign substance has been removed from somewhere it never should have been.

I looked at him like he was flippin' mad....trying to tell me this was healing pain. Healing pain my keister.

But I hobbled off to bed in hopes that by morning it would feel better.

No such luck.

I could hardly sleep it hurt so much. I was sure during the night that my toe was sprouting a garden under the blankets. But when I looked at it, it looked perfectly normal, which then made me consider that the bacteria from the pumpkin rind had somehow entered my toe blood stream and was getting secretly infected and would actually need to be amputated!

This was not good for my hypochondriatic tendencies.

So I walked to the bathroom, got the smallest pumpkin removal tools I could find, and set to work on my toe. You wanna know what I found....more pumpkin in my toe!

Isaak was wrong. There was still a major piece of pumpkin trapped very closely between my skin and toe. The only way to get it out was with a needle. It was the only thing small enough that could fit in there. So, I took a deep breath and carefully forced that needle down under my toe nail and started moving it back and forth to try to move the pumpkin up enough to pull out.

I'm not gonna lie....it was bad.

Real bad.

Just awful.

But I did it. I removed the rest of the pumpkin in my toe! The remaining piece was so big it was fitted under the skin all the way down to the bottom of my nail. So nasty!

But such sweet relief! Until the next day when I stubbed that same toe on the corner of our metal bedroom door. Dude! What the heck is my problem!

I'm gonna seriously have to work on my Africa stories. While everyone else is carrying on about how, "I slept in the bush for a week on the dirt ground with nothing more than a mosquito net." Or, " I came this close to being eaten by a hippo!" Or, " I once had malaria, typhoid, meningitis, rabies, yellow fever, and dengue fever all at the same time!" Or "I strangled a lion with my bare hands!"

I'm all like, "There was this one time I got pumpkin stuck in my toe." Doesn't exactly scream hard core.

In the meantime, while I work on my hard coreness, here are some things I have taken away from this experience.....

# 1. try not to stub your toe.
# 2. if refraining from toe stubbings is not an option, consider wearing steel toed shoes.
# 3. pumpkin in the toe hurts.
# 4. African pumpkins are harder than anywhere else in the world (that's my opinion and I'm stinkin' to it.
# 5. just avoid pumpkins at all costs, they are from the devil.