The big reveal. Part 3. A bath at last!

For me, the big moment was always going to be when I could at long last get my feet into warm water and begin to get to know them again.

That might sound odd, but I haven't been able to see, let alone touch, them for nearly two months, and now here they are all puffy and with sore red incisions, feeling tender and achy.

I really want to massage them and make them feel better, but I'm also scared to touch them in case it hurts too much!

Anyway, you're all just here for the pictures, so let's start with what they look like in the velcro shoes, while standing.

Sorry it's dark, we have ceiling spots in the bathroom and the multiple shadows they create, coupled with my amateur photography skills, make it difficult for me to get a good picture.

But I think you can see what my feet will look like in shoes once they're healed, and obviously once I no longer have to wear the spacers the other toes will move over into a more natural position, and I won't have a massive gap.

The next lot of pictures are close-ups of my dry scaly skin, and the incisions, steri strips and dried blood. If that's a problem for you, scroll down to the bottom, then scroll up slowly till you reach the point where I tell you it's safe!

Grimometer rating: 3/10

Off you go squeamish people!








Everyone else, here we go!

Nice huh? I was really interested in the pattern of the cracking on the balls of my feet. It wasn't what I'd expected, not that I'd thought about it much!







OK, squeamish people! You can come back in at this point. No more close-ups of grim stuff, I promise.




Next are some pictures just of my feet.

And just one more (well, you are reading a blog about feet!) showing my feet on the floor with a bit of weight on them, to try and see how they will look when I'm standing (but at this point I was too scared to stand on them!).

Again, apologies for the shadows. But you can see how the shape of my feet are very much more Roman now, than Greek. If that is all Greek to you (see what I did there?!) then have a read of this post, but basically this picture will show you what I mean.

Before I had the surgery, my feet looked like this:

And now they look like this.

If you can manage to get both pictures on your screen at once, you can see how amazing a job Mr Nugent has done.

At long last, it was time to get in the bath.

That was taken after I'd sorted out all the dead skin and cut my toenails. You'll be glad to hear that I didn't take any pictures of the dead skin, but suffice to say it was really quite disgusting.

There was so much on my feet, more than was obviously visible, that rubbing it off with my hands felt like I was degloving my foot.

Be very grateful I did the Googling for you - it also brings up pictures, and if I thought it was bad enough imagining it, I was right. DO NOT Google 'degloving' unless you are very strong of stomach. (There's no pictures on the link.)

Basically, it felt like I had a lot of very thick creamy stuff on my foot, which just slid off as I rubbed. Ugh. It really was vile.

And there was so much!

Eventually, it started to feel gritty when I rubbed, so I decided I'd reached virgin new skin that was very tender, and stopped. My feet were quite spottily red afterwards, and needed lots of cream rubbing in. But I will be doing that regularly from now on anyway to help them heal and to massage my scars.

I also peeled off my steri strips, which came off easily and without me feeling weird, once they were soaked through.

I gently dabbed at my feet with a towel to dry them, and gingerly applied loads of cream. The scars felt quite tender still, but I'm sure they will harden up with time.

To finish I put on some very thin socks to keep the cream from rubbing off. I used a pair I got from the soft play centre that are meant for one use only. They actually hold up quite well in the wash, and I like them as lightweight socks to put on after I've put cream on my feet at bedtime.

You can't buy them in the shops, as they are only sold in bulk from Blue Box Socks and I can't imagine having a use for 200 pairs! But they only cost £1 from play centres and my two pairs have survived a 40 degree wash quite happily.

So there you have it! The full and final reveal! Now it's on to relearning to walk, looking after my scars, and the final leg of the recovery.