those crappy feet

My toenail is falling off.

You remember I walloped my toe a few weeks back? Well, it's healed up, but I was scratching my toe last night and noticed that the nail was hanging off. You know when your nails grow how the part that's not attached to your flesh hangs off? Well almost the entire nail is like that. There's just a small sliver at the bottom keeping it on.

It doesn't hurt in any way, and that small sliver seems quite rigid, but it's a weird feeling knowing your toenail is dangling off.

Generally, I suffer with my feet anyway.

Or, more specifically, I suffer with my heels. The problem really, I guess, is that I'm appallingly fat. This means that my feet have to support a much greater weight than most people - imagine spending all day giving someone of equal size to yourself (for I way twice as much as I should) a piggyback ride all day. That's roughly what it's like.

So as a result, my feet are subject to a hell of a lot of stress and one of the ways this manifests itself is in a thickening of the skin on the heels of my feet. I think most people get a bit of this - the skin naturally thickens to provide additional protection and cushioning where you're getting a lot of friction and wear. It's like an accumulation of dead skin to act like an extra layer of padding.

So it's basically normal, but my problem is I get excessive amounts of it, due to this excess baggage I carry around. My feet are subject to such heavy forces that the natural effect is sped up and emphasised. In other words I get whacking great lumps of dead skin on my heels.

Now this would okay - cushioning can hardly be a bad thing for someone of my size - except for the fact that it tends to reach something of a critical volume, after which is cracks. Anyone who has had cracked skin will know that this is not a pleasant experience.

Indeed, when standing in certain positions, the stressing forces make it feel like someone is jabbing needles into my heels. See, the cracks go deep - right down to the soft flesh beneath, and here's where it gets gross.

See, the only cure I've got for this is to cut the dead skin away. However, it's almost impossible to easily tell the amount of dead skin there is, so this means I end up hacking it away in uneven lumps, often using the blade on my penknife. And when you get right down to the roots of the cracks, I generally find that they go far enough down to actually have small amounts of blood seeping out.

Oh, it's not properly flowing - think the sort of overly red flesh you get from a small paper cut - but it's definitely there. And it doesn't help the overall effect that the hacking and slashing makes it look like my foot has had an accident with the business end of a chainsaw.

To try to stave off the need for such extreme action I use a special cheese grater thing once a week on my feet. You have to use it after you've had a shower, because otherwise the skin is too tough to get through (hence the need for the penknife) and every week I scrape away loads of dead skin, but over time it still builds up.

Oh the price of beauty. No wait, this isn't that is it?