Goines On: Toe’s up!

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The very evening of the day Goines had reviled himself for uttering his “T”-cap joke to the landscaper, he stubbed a big toe on the stepping stone the landscaper had recently installed just off the lawn near the composting tumbler, which Mrs. Goines had suggested be positioned near their back porch for his convenience. He didn’t sleep well that night, with a throbbing, electric pain, about level 3 out of 10, but enough to slow his going to sleep, or back to sleep each time he awoke to pee.

    During a morning hour of the night he dreamed of the toenail, standing upright, torn almost completely out of its bed, and then of his brain being torn away from its moorings, which Goines understood, in lucid-dream terms, represented his declining mental faculties, which he had been sharply reminded of that week by his inability to remember the last name of a man whose first child had died a few months earlier. But now, easily, the last name came to him, and he reclaimed it.
    Goines had managed to hobble into the house the evening before and grab a tissue to wrap around the toe so as not to trail too much blood through the house. In the bathroom, he pushed the nail back into its bed and mopped off the rest of the blood from around the nail and the huge blood blister on the end of the toe, before calling to Mrs. Goines, “I need help!”
    She applied a non-stick pad and wrapped the toe with stretchy tape. “We’re going to need to buy you some open-toe sandals tomorrow,” she said. Until then he was going to have to continue with the flip-flops he had foolishly been wearing when he inattentively tried to mount the stepping stone. In the morning, he would try to get an immediate doctor’s appointment in the morning, before they did their planned grocery shopping at Costco.
    He felt alert and awake in the morning, which he attributed to his dream, and he was able to put his shoes on comfortably, swelling and bandage notwithstanding, as a demonstration to his wife that he didn’t need sandals after all. After making breakfast, he called the triage nurse in his primary care physician’s practice for advice. They had no openings at all that day, and she suggested he go to urgent care; a center in their network was located near the hospital in Hillsborough.
    The PA who attended him did a proficient job cleaning his wound, injecting local anesthetic, and cutting away some of the nail before she applied an ointment and bandaged the toe the same way Mrs. Goines had. She saw no evidence the toe had been punctured, so she didn’t think a tetanus shot would be needed. Just ointment, bandaging, staying off his feet for a couple of days, and keeping the foot up to lessen the pooling of blood in it. “And open-toe sandals would be a good idea” – Mrs. Goines had brought up sandals during the exam.
    They drove to a store in Chapel Hill that Mrs. Goines recommended and Goines liked the first pair of sandals they saw; the next size up from the one on display was perfect. Like his visit to urgent care in Minnesota a couple of months earlier, for relief of an infected thumbnail, this second nail problem was also having some up-side. The dream, the new sandals, meeting another compassionate young urgent-caregiver – the two women like angels in disguise. And Mrs. Goines too – his primary angel.
    The Goineses had been re-watching all of the seasons of Call the Midwife on Netflix, both of them finding the Anglican nuns – and the secular midwives too – very affecting. Every episode dramatized one or more human redemptions amidst all the squalor and pain and self-sacrifice of London’s East End.

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