For the last several years, my toes and I have had, at best, a strained relationship. They don't like me and I don't particularly like them, but without them my sandals would fall off and without me they'd never get to see interesting new places so we put up with each other. A few months ago, though, they went too far.

The story goes back to the summer of 1998 when I accidentally dropped a lawnmower on my foot (I know, I know, everyone has a "dropped a lawnmower on my foot" story). I was working at summer camp, and I was supposed to take a bunch of little kids on a hayride but the camp tractor still had the lawnmowing attachment on the back (looked sort of like this). When I disconnected it, it fell onto my foot - caught me right on my left big toenail. I'm fairly sure that's the most pain I've ever been in; I was completely incapacitated for a few minutes (and the close proximity of the camp pool made it impossible to let loose with any really cathartic language).

That toenail fell off a few days later, but apparently my toe was still mad at me because when it grew back it never really grew back connected to the toe and it fell off again about a year after that (meanwhile, I also lost my right big toenail after a kid from my youth group stepped on it during a heated game of "Try to Knock Mark DeVries Over with Sofa Cushions". Youth ministry is dangerous stuff). The third time seemed to be the charm, though - the toenail looked a little weird but seemed to be functional. Until last May.

Last May the inside edge of the toenail started growing down into my toe. Apparently the toenail had gotten sick of dealing with me and had decided to just remove my toe so it and the toenail could go be happy on their own. I couldn't help but admire its initiative, but I didn't want to give up my toe. After a month, it had become painful to put on shoes (not often a problem for me since I'm a devoted sandal-wearer, but I have a shoe-requiring and walking-intensive job) and every so often I'd catch the toe on something and have an entrant in the running contest to beat having a lawnmower fall on my foot for "most painful experience ever". Clearly, something needed to be done. I talked to some friends and co-workers and they all told me to go see a doctor, who would cut away the part of the toenail that was digging into my toe and leave me with an oddly-shaped but no longer painful toenail. Most of that sounded fine, but it seemed silly to me to pay someone else to cut part of my toenail off when I had plenty of cutting implements handily available to me. And so, Gentle Readers, I present for your personal edification Charlie Rod's Handy Guide to Do-It-Yourself Toenail-In-The-Toe Amelioration. All you need is a Swiss Army knife and a pair of pliers. I personally vouch for its effectiveness.

• Step One - determine how much of the toenail you'll actually need to remove. I chose to cut so that the toenail looked more or less symmetrical - one side goes a little ways into the toe and one doesn't, but it doesn't look all that odd. Take the awl extension on your Swiss Army knife and gently score a guide line into the nail.
  
• Step Two - cut the rest of the nail through along the guide line. This is the tricky bit (although still certainly not requiring four years of med school to figure out); it's going to be impossible to cut through the nail at the same time along the length of your cut, so you're likely going to have your knife slip down fairly often as you get past solid keratin and to parts that are already cut through and end up slamming the blade into the toe beneath (and the flesh beneath your toenails is extraordinarily wussy stuff, ridiculously oversupplied with pain receptors). My advice is to go very slowly and try to cut up from underneath the nail whenever you can. The trickiest bit here is the most proximal (closest to the foot) part of the nail. There will likely be quite a bit of blood and, if your toe is like mine was and has been ingrown for a while, probably some pus and interstitial fluid, too. If it helps, keep in mind that step three sucks far more than step two. Also, you can't really stop once you've already cut most of your toenail loose.
  
• Step three - once you've cut through the nail along the guideline (or at least mostly cut through - if there's a little left it'll pull free on step four), lift the cut-off bit of nail up from the new edge you've just made (so that it sort of resembles a tiny drawbridge pulling away from the main nail) and cut underneath. There's a bunch of connective tissue there that you need to detach from the nail before you pull it loose. This step is really quite horrid; it's astoundingly painful to turn the new little nail-fragment in the flesh of your toe, and that sensation is magnified by the knowledge that the whole thing is being voluntarily, consciously done. Also, again, if you're doing this in the first place your toe is probably already badly inflamed and sore from the ingrown toenail that you're about to fix. Cutting the connective tissue, on the other hand, doesn't hurt a bit, so at least there's that.
  
• Step four - finally, once you've got the connective tissue cut loose, grab hold of the little toenail piece with a pair of pliers (it'll be far too slick to grab with your fingers) and apply steady, firm pressure straight up (perpendicular to the line your toe makes) until the front of the nail clears your toe - it'll look sort of like a tiny, white, bloody battleship. Then pull straight forward and out it'll come. The sense of relief at finally being done with the whole remarkably unpleasant process will only be exceeded by wonder at how much better your toe suddenly feels.
  

And that's today's handy tip. If any of you ever have reason to try it, please let me know - I'll be curious to see if your experience varies from mine. I'll try to post again fairly soon so that this entry doesn't stay at the top of the page for overly long.