Vol 113: Tis the season
As a young child, every Christmas morning I walked as quickly as my little legs would allow, headed with all the speed I could muster toward our living room. I walked as if there were a treasure waiting just for me and I walked so quickly I might as well have been running. The last Christmas I ran, I tripped and scraped my knee on our tile floor. It was a lesson well-learned. In the front right corner of our living room stood a modest Fir Christmas tree adorned with large red bows, hand-painted ornaments and a white-robed Angel on top. The warm lights glistened and for a child, many times just sitting there in the dead of night, it felt like I was looking directly at the stars.
After Midnight mass, I’d pretend to sleep for a few hours, tossing and turning in anticipation. Then, at the first break of sunlight, I went to the tree where my father would already be taking all the presents and sorting them into piles for each family member. I watched gleefully but hidden where he couldn’t see me, secretly peering to see how big my pile would become. Afterwards, when called, we’d sit behind our own individual gifts, each one of us encircling the tree and one at a time my parents, siblings and I anxiously took turns opening them while drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows. When we were finished, we ate breakfast and watched cartoons as my mom and dad fielded calls from neighbors, friends and family members wishing us a Merry Christmas. It was always the most magical time of the year and my happiest childhood memory.
It's hard to believe that’s the same time of the year as now. Christmas is a little more than one week away and tis the season to be jolly but it hardly feels like Christmas. I’m not sure why. One can easily chalk it up to just getting older and the inevitable wax of nostalgia with age but perhaps it’s something deeper.
Perhaps I, and dare I say we, have become so distracted by the day-to-day machinations of life, so caught up in the cogwheels as one day turns into the next that we’re no longer able to recognize the magic of the season. It’s easy to say that the Christmas season is only magical for children and we’re not expected to feel the same magic now that we’re grown. But somehow the difference feels larger and the void between the magic then and the lack of it now, is far greater than one explained by age alone.
Outside the medical field, we often hear people refer to an ingrown toenail as a matter so insignificant as to represent something blown out of proportion. It’s the perfect example of not understanding how small things like losing the holiday magic can relate to larger issues, and so today I wanted to share the story of a patient hereafter referred to as Ricky whom I treated for a badly infected ingrown toenail.
Ricky is in his early twenties with no past medical problems. He says that his nails always grow into the flesh and he’s been able to self-debride it as far back as possible without issue for years. That is until he wore a particularly tight pair of dress shoes which is when the toe became red and swollen with intense pain to light touch. He was treating it at home with hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic ointment but to no avail. By the time he presented to my office, the toe had doubled in size and there was obvious purulent discharge with notable redness.
Ricky described the pain as someone sticking a knife into his toe over and over again. Other times it felt so numb and swollen that it could burst at any moment. His constant throbbing was exacerbated by wearing socks, closed-in shoes, light palpation to the area or simply brushing his toe against bed sheets.
I anesthetized Ricky’s toe, cleansed the area with an anti-septic solution and surgically removed the ingrown toenail in office. Then I prescribed an oral antibiotic and explained how to perform his daily dressing changes. The day after the nail was excised, his pain resolved entirely and, on his follow-up, visit a week later, the area was 85 percent healed.
And now that Ricky won’t have to worry about his toenails, I asked him how he and his family would be spending the holidays. The question took him by surprise. He hadn’t realized that Christmas was so close. That ended my theory that not feeling the holiday spirit may be correlated with advancing age.
We’ve all become so busy he said, with so many distractions and things to do that it’s easy to lose track of time, as if it comes barreling at you. Days line up, rolling into one another unceasingly. The news cycle focuses on endless conflict, too many headlines shouting news we don’t want to hear. Ricky questioned how can it feel like Christmas when it feels like the world is constantly in a state of chaos.
There’s a story I often think about during the Christmas holidays. It was written by a gentleman under the pen name of O. Henry called ‘Gift of the Magi’ and it was first published in 1905. The story tells us about a husband and wife who sell their most valuable possessions on Christmas eve in order to afford a gift for one another. Neither has money but they have love and they badly want to show it. The wife sells her hair and uses the money to buy her husband a fob chain to go with his beloved gold pocket watch, a family heirloom. Unbeknownst to her, her husband sold his watch to buy her a pair of ornamental hair combs. Neither the husband nor the wife can use their gifts but both instantly realize that they were willing to sell something they treasured for the person they love. The story reminds us particularly during this time of the year that loving others and being selfless is the greatest gift we can give.
My office manager Gina reminded me that we have a patient who broke her ankle and ruptured her anterior talofibular ligament. She’ll require surgical intervention and is so upset that she can’t bring herself to be excited about the upcoming holiday. Another patient just lost her father and he’ll be buried two days before Christmas, just a few short months after she buried her mother. For so many people, life right now is filled with challenges or overwhelming sadness so it’s hard to feel merry. For them, it is up to us, to those people who know them, to reach out and ease their pain and for those of us blessed to be free of pain and anguish, all the more reason to use this season to celebrate life and treasure the people we love.
Ricky understands as well as anyone that small nuisances can very quickly become serious health concerns. But those small nuisances can also be poignant reminders for us all to slow down. He’ll use the holiday break to give thanks for his good health. I hope many more of us do the same because even if we don’t bounce down the steps or race to the Christmas tree, tis the season to be jolly and right about now, we could all use a reason to rest, reflect and just be merry.
This is The KDK Report.
