Katie Bartel, Registered Dietitian

Waiting on the toenail fairy

Just when I thought my feet couldn’t get any uglier, my toe goes and falls off … well, the nail that is. Remember these:

That happened three and a half months ago, the result of a rain-riddled marathon and of more than four hours of wet toes rubbing against wet shoes. For weeks they were the colour of fire-engine red, they blew up to the size of air-filled balloons, were angry and incessantly screamed out in pain. And then, when the pain finally subsided, they turned to the shade of purple and stayed that way. Normally I would have loved the colour purple, it used to be a favourite colour of mine, but on my toes, toes that did not EVER wear polish, the colour purple was downright ugly really.

At first I thought the nails would fall off, but they were stubborn little buggers, oh yes they were. They didn’t grow, they didn’t dissipate in colour, they just stayed there ugly and nasty. About a month ago, I got sick of one of them and forcefully removed the little sucker – to great amounts of splurting blood all over my bathroom floor. But last night when I did a quick clip of the nails, to avoid any toenail-related injury for this morning’s run, I noticed a change. Clip. Clip. Clip… what? I got to the big toe on the right foot and the nail was just kind of uplifted, and hanging there by a thread. Ewww, I so threw up a little in my mouth as I peeled the nasty nail away from the skin. Thankfully there was no blood this time, but there was a quarter of a bumpy toenail already grown underneath. Blech.

I was a little stymied as to what the heck I was supposed to do with the fallen-off nail. Should I have thrown it away? Should I have safely stored it with all my other life treasures? Should I have stuck it under my pillow and waited for the toenail fairy?

If you haven’t already guessed, I absolutely hate feet, find everything about them utterly disgusting, and so, there really wasn’t any question as what to do at all – that sucker was destined for the trash bin!

TODAY’S RUN:

Today’s run was brrrcold, felt like Winterpeg weather and not the usually balmy West Coast. My hands were so cold they were aching, my lips were numb, I was spluttering my words, and on the way home the heat was cranked in my car for a good 45 minutes of the hour long drive to stop the teeth chattering. I’m not really complaining though, it was a beautiful, clear, sunshiny day after all. And I’ll take that, with the cold, over rain (and God forbid snow) any day! And besides, because it was so cold, I think my ankle thought I was icing it, and it didn’t give me any grief at all 😀

TODAY’S BREAKFAST:

When I saw that my blood sugars had risen to 12.6 two hours after I had eaten, my initial reaction was to give a BG correction. While I’ve always preferred to start my runs a little higher than usual, I had no idea if my blood sugars would continue to rise, something I did not want to happen, but given that this is an experiment to see what the perfect LSD breakfast is for me, I had to put faith in my morning actions of no BG correction. And I’m glad I did, 8.0 is a decent number to end a run with, not a perfect number, but decent, and with a longer run, I probably would have ended with perfection. The verdict: A near perfect LSD breakfast.

Did you notice anything different about me in the picture today 😀

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