Under the Knife

WARNING! GRAFIC CONTENT. 

It all started about three weeks ago on a very rainy day.  That particular day started out nice with the sun shining but turned sour as I was heading home from school.  It began pouring, pouring doesn’t quite describe it; a storm had erupted.  I was wearing sandals and was having trouble keeping them on as it down-poured.  I shouldn’t have been surprised when I noticed a blister on the bottom of my foot, but I was surprised by the size of it.  A week went by and the blister only became larger since it was on the bottom of my foot and I do quite a bit of walking here.  After a few days it was literally unbearable to walk on but I didn’t want to stop living life just because I had a blister.  I thought the pain was only due to the fact that it was on the bottom of my foot and not anything more.  On Wednesday I complained that my ankle was hurting and everyone told me that it was probably because I was limping and only walking on one side of my foot.  That made sense so again I sucked up the pain and kept going.  The next day I literally could not take the pain anymore and decided to pop the blister.  It didn’t exactly change anything but I figured it would take a day for it to feel normal.  Wrong.  The next day I woke up in even more pain and could literally not feel my leg.  I called my parents and when my dad asked if there were red lines going up my legs I noticed that there were.  He said that was a sign of an infection and I should go to the doctor.  After stumbling my way to school our program intern Grace took me the international hospital.  Since most things seem to take longer in Russia I expected to be there all day.  However, I didn’t even get to sit down before the nurse took me to see the doctor.  First the doctor asked me some questions, all in Russian, I will now never forget the word for blister or infection.  Then he looked at my foot.  After about a seconds glance he said he would need to perform an operation.  His exact words were (in Russian) “We need to cut the foot”.  So there I am in his office balling my eyes out because I think he is going to cut off my foot.  As the nurse is taking me to the operation room she told me she had it done once and it wasn’t so bad.  I looked at her and noticed she still had both her feet and immediately felt relieved.  Now I wont go into too many details but for the record they do not numb your foot in Russia before they cut into it.  As painful as that was I immediately felt the infection flowing out of my leg.  It was the weirdest feeling but a good one.  Despite this, I cried and the doctor kept asking me why I was crying.  I wanted to say “hmm I don’t know, maybe because someone is cutting my foot open with a knife?”  He kept talking to me to distract me from the pain but I kept having to ask him to repeat what he was saying since listening to someone speak Russian and responding isn’t the easiest to do while you’re crying.  After the surgery I still couldn’t really walk and ended up taking a taxi home.  I got a fever a little later because of the medicine but despite all that I was relived to know I was on the path to recovery.  I never wanted to say I had been to Russian hospital, let alone have surgery in Russia, but today I am thankful that my blood infection is gone and I can enjoy my last days in Russia.  Moral of the story: be attentive to your blisters so that they don’t get infected!