The Nail In My Foot

I am at work and the children are all asleep, two in cribs, one on the white leather couch. I am sitting with their grandmother trying to figure out which felt figures to cut out of Betty Lukens Felt Bible and how to store the soft fabric pictures in the giant blue folders. We make conversation about the complexity of the Felt Bible, how much work it will take to cut out every character, tree, star, and animal. There are pages and pages of thin, felt people in colorful togas, golden stars to be hung on dark blue backgrounds, and farm animals everywhere. I feel a thin layer of excitement at the idea of a simple, monotonous task.

When I rang the bell today, their grandmother opened the door for me, credit card and receipt for the Felt Bible in her soft, wrinkled hand. She smiled at me.

“I don’t know where I left my credit card,” she announces fifteen minutes after we’ve been running our hands over the white backs of felt, smoothing it over the dining room table. Both of us wonder how the felt figures will stick to the felt backgrounds. I’ve been picking at the back with my nail, as per the instructions.

“Oh, I remember you had it when you came to the door,” I say. I shift some of the materials around the table, searching for the plastic, blue card. I don’t find it, so I stand up, intending to look around more.

There will be no more looking around for the credit card. I stand up and a long nail pierces the white bottom of my foot, going straight through the soft flesh. All at once there is pain everywhere, like a video game where the edges of the screen flash red.

There’s a yoga pose where you squat on one leg and lift the other up so your ankle is resting on your squatting knee. I stand just like that, staring at the thick white cylinder now attached to the space underneath my toes. I touch it, try to coax it out and realize I can’t do that; there was never a chance I could do that. I will live forever with this nail in my foot. I will be known as The Guy With A Nail In Their Foot. I will die like this. Maybe I’ll die right now.

I am hyperventilating already and one hundred thoughts are going through my head: I never thought this would happen to me, I see stories like this online, people whose eyeballs pop out of their skulls, friend from high school with splinter going through her entire toe, skin cut off, nail stuck, removal of nail, how can this be happening to me, how do I get it out, I can’t get it out, it really hurts, how did this happen, what do I do?

My Felt Bible friend notices me squirming around on one foot, eyes wide, staring. I am both completely still and on fire with movement. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I say, but it’s more of a breath of air leaving my lips than a word. I am in the process of accepting my new life as a guy with a nail stuck in their foot.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, coming around the table. No words will leave my mouth. I am at a total loss to describe what’s happening or how it’s happening. I feel completely wordless, nothing is inside my head, only a hot, piercing pain. I know this isn’t true because one of the sweet mothers I work for told me that I was very calm and said, “Um, I have a pin in my foot,” before their grandmother pulled the pin out.

She looks at my socked foot and takes a second to realize that the object on my sock is also inside my sock and also inside my foot. She freaks out in a much different way than I am freaking out; she says a lot of religious words in Arabic (“Ya Rab, Yasua, Ya Messiha”) and then cups my foot in her hand and pulls the nail in one swift motion out of the cushion of my foot.

“Oh, God,” I say as she pulls the pin out. “Okay, oh, God.” I feel almost infected by her religiosity.

I breathe out in one long breath and sit on the chair, tears filling my eyes, still in so much pain. “Thank you,” I say. I smile the world’s most pained smile at her, but she’s already walking away to go get alcohol swabs and band aids. She was a doctor in Egypt, but in America she’s a substitute teacher. I feel grateful to be left alone, tears pricking my eyes.

River Halen writes in Dream Rooms, “Pain is a very clarifying state in that/ it removes the outside world entirely/ you get to focus on your feeling/ I was so completely in my feeling… shame was a tiny speck down on the ground/ it was the perfect lyric moment.” Yes, I was very in my feeling. If I closed my eyes, the whole world shrunk to the new piercing in my foot.

I sit on the chair by myself for a moment and process the pain, letting myself cry partly because of the sudden, intense pain and partly because I don’t know why— I feel inexplicably sad for some reason. I feel something akin to embarrassment, maybe it’s vulnerability. Is vulnerability a feeling? I feel like I should not be crying this much, but how much should I be crying? How much do people with deep puncture wounds in their feet normally cry? Am I being normal right now? I really want to be normal right now. I want somebody to look at me and think, “Wow, what a totally normal person.”

Part of me is weirdly grateful this happened to me and not one of the three children I’m paid to look after, their feet are much tinier than mine, and it would be catastrophic if a nail slid into their soles. I want to share this observation, but I’m worried I’ll seem like I’m being too nice about it, so I don’t say that. My parents call being too verbally nice “laying it on thick.” I don’t want to lay it on thick, I don’t want to lay it on at all.

Lucky for my injured foot, I am in a house full of doctors. Everyone keeps referring to the object that was in my foot as “a nail,” but it looks like an extra-long and thick thumbtack, which yes, I guess that is what a nail is. The nail/pin/thumbtack was fastened to the bottom of the dining room chair to keep it from scuffing the wood floors. When one of the husbands comes home, he turns all the chairs over and removes every pin with a wrench, ensuring no more pins will pierce anybody’s feet. Everyone keeps apologizing to me and offering me ice cream and leftover Halloween candy. I feel very silly, one sock on, one sock off, teary-eyed, smiling at what I hope is a brave smile. I’m supposed to be taking care of their children, and they are all taking care of me.

When the oldest boy wakes up from his nap, he reaches over to tickle my injured foot to make me smile. I do smile. I really like this kid. He gets excited to see me, and I get excited that he’s excited. I practice play therapy skills on him eight hours a week, and the rapport building must be working because he likes me. Sometimes he looks up at me with his little boy face and says, “I love you!” and I respond back the same way, feeling very proud that I can coax a child into loving me.

The next time he sees me he waves excitedly, and he asks, “Is your ouchy all better?”

“Yes,” I say, “All better now.”

*

I can’t really think of times I’ve been in pain. I feel like a very backwards solipsist where the only me that exists is the one that exists in this particular moment. When I am happy, I have only ever been happy. When I’m sad, happiness has never existed in my body. I think people call that “having BIG feelings.”

Thinking of pain in my own life, I think about being doubled over with stomach aches, leaning over the toilet because migraines make me nauseous, and getting blood drawn from the soft inside of my elbow. Needles are the worst to me, even now I keep saying to the doctor “Wait, wait, just give me like one more second,” and my heart beats wildly in my chest trampling my whole body.

I don’t know when I started doing it but lately when I get vaccines I hum to myself, long enough for the needle to be inserted and extracted. I turn my face away, clench my purse like a teddy bear and try to relax my muscles. Getting a penicillin test a few months ago, the nurse kept telling me how brave I was as she pricked me six times, one after the other while I flailed my legs, and hummed, and clenched my eyes shut. I felt very childish. I only asked her to wait once.

The breaking of skin is the worst pain I can imagine. My mouth tastes metallic when I read about people ripping their IVs out. A friend of mine told me his least favorite sound is the sound of his own flesh ripping and muscle snapping away from when he tried to stab himself in the chest. I think about that moment sometimes and wonder what led up to it and what happened after, but it’s too late to ask him.

There are people who can’t feel pain because their pain-sensing nerves aren’t connected properly to their brains. It’s called congenital insensitivity to pain. It sounds nice at first, a life with no physical pain, but then there’s complications like not being able to feel heat or cold or a broken bone, not being able to care for yourself because you lack a sense of homeostasis. You can’t heal or go easy on your broken parts if you don’t sense that they’re broken. In this way, pain is useful because it alerts you to something being wrong.

Many people with congenital insensitivity to pain even struggle with hyperreactivity and emotional instability, demonstrating a connection between physical and emotional pain. One study found that people with CIP still feel empathy for others in pain and can accurately estimate the level of physical pain others are feeling.

When I look at others in pain, I feel it in my legs, a burning, butterfly sensation creeping up on me. My pain aligns, sympathetically, with yours.

*

After every doctor in the house examined my foot and asked me about the bones in my foot, the nail, and the removal of the nail, they decide I should leave for the day and get a tetanus shot. My mom drives me to CVS because it hurts too much to press my foot to the gas pedal of my own car.

I joke about how unlucky I am, getting stabbed twice in one day. I sit on the grey fabric chair waiting for the pharmacist to come out with the needle full of Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis. I look at the needle in her gloved hand and feel that pain in my legs again, anticipating.

“Will this hurt a lot?” I ask. I always ask, and the holder of the needle always says,

“It’ll just be a little pinch.”

“Okay,” I say. I turn my head away and grip my bag while she inserts the needle into my arm. She was right, it was a little pinch, but it felt significantly better than the nail in my foot, so I felt pretty good by comparison.

I think the nail cured my intense fear of needles because the fatness and length of it was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced, and needles seem so tiny and fragile now. It’s nothing to be poked with a needle. Maybe this nail in my foot was almost worth it.

*

I visited my family in California recently. My cousin has a 30-something-year-old African Grey parrot named Willy. He nervously picks the feathers off his chest until it’s all pink skin and a thin layer of baby white feathers.

Willy hates most people. He hates towels and things that remind him of towels. He lived the majority of his life in a cage with a distant relative who was apparently not very kind to him. Willy really likes my cousin though and sits perched on his shoulder whenever he gets the chance. I think their bond is made stronger by the fact that my cousin was the first person to really try and understand Willy, his boundaries, his dislikes, and behaviors.

My cousin explains Willy’s warning signs to me, what he’ll do before he climbs onto my finger, and how I’ll know when Willy wants me to back off. Puffed feathers means he’s angry, head down means either defensive or open to being pet, he’ll test my fingers for solidity with his beak if he wants to climb up.

He sets the bird on the floor, and I sit cross-legged next to him as he walks around the tiled kitchen floor, tapping his talons as he goes. I offer him my finger and he slowly places his beak around it, I think he’s going to climb up. He bites down on my finger as hard as he can.

I don’t hold the biting against him because if I lived Willy’s life, I’d probably bite everybody I interacted with too. He’s only defending himself from the potential threat of me.

My fiancé’s dog, Jethro, once came downstairs to find a guest in the house. Not knowing that this woman was invited in, and thus not an intruder who wanted to kill my fiancé and his father, Jethro charged at her and bit her on the neck. Here is this heavy, large dog, hanging off of this girl’s neck, here he is releasing slightly and clamping down again. She had to go to the hospital, but she was okay.

After the horror wore off, Eric and I made many jokes about this instance. About Jethro hating white women, about Jethro hating this specific white woman. Jethro really is a good boy, he just made a mistake to protect the people he loved. He valued the people he cared about over the life of some stranger, and we were all very lucky this stranger didn’t try to sue the pants off Jethro (he didn’t really wear pants, though he did love his Christmas sweater).

I can always excuse pain caused by animals because it is defensive. I think humans causing pain to each other can be psychologically defensive but mostly it just feels cruel. An animal doesn’t inflict pain and suffering just for the sake of inflicting. An animal needs to eat and then kills, an animal is afraid and has to attack, an animal is warning you.

My cat Tomato has claws that are too long and, in an effort, to hug my leg and climb my torso and knead my stomach, she pricks me again and again and again. She’s really trying to show love, and I am covered in tiny, thin scabs that show how much she loves me. It’s strange how love can be expressed through pain.

If you don’t trim a cats claws, they will grow like a rabbit’s teeth, curving around and around until it pricks the soft padding of their toes. I’ll remedy the problem before it begins, by cradling her in my arms and clipping the sharp ends off of her claws and she will hate every second of it but it has to be done. Because I love her, because I don’t want her to be in pain, because even though she doesn’t understand why I’m making her suffer for a moment I am really just looking out for her.