Get the glass out of my foot!

December 25, 2019 11:49 PM

Forgive the grossness up front, and skip if need be. I like to walk barefoot. Over time, I've gotten splinters, shards of glass, all the things in my feet. I've always gotten them out. A few months ago, I got some household glass in my foot, and I couldn't get it out.

It's now a hard, enclosed little thing, and it can be quite painful, but it's not infected. It's just close enough to the surface to hurt, but not close enough to get out on my own.

I've tried a bandaid with epsom and baking soda. Didn't work. Am willing to see my doctor, but an ER seems silly.

posted by heigh-hothederryo to Health & Fitness (20 answers total)

Soak it in very hot water and epsom salts for 30 minutes or more 3-4 times a day. It's important to get the dissolved solution of epsom salts as highly concentrated as possible. So use the smallest container you can fit the relevant part of your foot in , start with near boiling water and keep mixing salt in for a few minutes , continuously adding extra until no more dissolves. This will be a LOT of epsom salt. Buy the larger bag. It should come out within 48 hours. If it doesn't I'd go to my doc or a doc in the box and have them dig it out. But I bet it does.
posted by fshgrl at 12:20 AM on December 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

It's now a hard, enclosed little thing

Sounds like a granuloma formed around it.
posted by thelonius at 12:22 AM on December 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

If you can’t get it out with Epsom salts magic, I’d see a dermatologist as they’re accustomed to cutting things out of skin.
posted by quince at 1:24 AM on December 26, 2019 [5 favorites]

My Mom was an RN and taught me to sterilize a safety pin with a match and dig it out her- (or my) self.
posted by rhizome at 2:03 AM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

It sounds a lot like a corn. I get one from running and I just have to sand down my foot until I get to it. I use this metal rasp file after I shower. It takes a couple of days of filing to get down to the corn and essentially sand it off.
posted by srboisvert at 2:42 AM on December 26, 2019

Best answer: Am willing to see my doctor

Do that.

I like to walk barefoot as well, and have tough soles as a result. I learned early on that softening my soles with half an hour in the bath and then digging out those little shards before they cyst up saves medical expenses, but in the process of learning that I also learned that any GP willing to wield betadine, a scalpel and a set of forceps makes much quicker work of the digging process than I do, mainly due to less awkward access to the wound site and less innate unwillingness to inflict minor pain.

Lignocaine is also amazing stuff. If it's mainly pain that has you unwilling to dig a big enough hole in yourself to get this thing out, your doc can inject it as a local anaesthetic, or you might even find that slapping an EMLA patch on the site for half an hour will allow you to deal with it yourself.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on December 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

This will be a LOT of epsom salt. Buy the larger bag.

I buy mine from a local farm supplies store in a 25kg bag. They sell it as magnesium sulphate heptahydrate fertilizer, but that's just fancy talk for Epsom salt. It works just as well from a great big bag as it does from a tiny cardboard box and costs way less per kilogram. It's nice to be able to dump a kilo into a hot bath to get the whole day spa thing happening without worrying about the cost.
posted by flabdablet at 3:27 AM on December 26, 2019 [7 favorites]

MONTHS? Good Lord, if you have the means then see a doctor!
posted by Anonymous at 4:54 AM on December 26, 2019

Best answer: Dude, this exact thing happened to me a couple months ago. I ultimately had to go to an urgent care clinic for it - not an ER, but one of those walk-in urgent care clinics. And doing so convinced me that I wouldn't have ever been able to get it out on my own, because the piece of glass was ultimately so teeny-tiny that I wouldn't have ever been able to get a purchase on it even with the best tweezers I had in my house. The whole visit took maybe 40 minutes (most of which was waiting room time), and even though the doctor had to give me a shot of novacaine and made an incision with a scalpel, he only had to cover it over with a regular band-aid and after two days I didn't even need the bandaid, and the pain from the glass was relieved immediately.

I understand your not wanting to go to the ER, but if there's an urgent care clinic just do that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:36 AM on December 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

Best answer: Oh, and the doctor I saw at the urgent care clinic told me that the kind of "hard enclosed thing" is a thing that does happen sometimes; he had a client once who'd had such a thing in her foot for years, he said, before she finally came to see him for help. Even though your foot isn't infected, it's causing you discomfort. Go see a doctor of some kind, even just your regular one.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:38 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Definitely see your doctor. Your feet are pretty important parts and a problem developing in one of them can really negatively impact your mobility. It seems fine for now, but you wouldn’t want to risk something going wrong if you took it out yourself.
posted by sallybrown at 5:58 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Someone scraped one of these out of my foot years ago with a razor blade and I think it was a doctor. Go to the doctor.
posted by bendy at 6:11 AM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I am also going to encourage you to see a doctor but for an additional reason. The pain in your foot is probably influencing how you walk. Not consciously but unconsciously. As my physical therapist has explained, if we change how we walk or move because of pain in one part of our body, we often create stress and misalignment in other parts of our body. So it’s entirely possible that you may end up with physical problems somewhere else in your body (leg, knee, hip, whatever) because of attempts you aren’t even aware of to protect your foot as you walk. If you can afford it, call your doctors office and talk to a nurse. If there’s a long waiting time, see if you can get in earlier if somebody cancels. Sorry to be a nag. This should be an easy and cheap service, and I am sorry it probably isn’t. Good luck!
posted by Bella Donna at 6:52 AM on December 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

It's also possible it could actually be a small plantar wart. If it's in the thick skin on the sole of your foot you can use the liquid wart treatment to thin the skin down until either the object is uncovered, or to make your skin thinner prior to doing some self surgery. This will work even if you have a granuloma or a bit of splinter instead of a wart.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:54 AM on December 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone! Very good advice here - and I *am* walking differently, which is bad.
I will try walk-in urgent care today or tomorrow. Even it is staffed with nurse-practitioners or PAs, they should still try to slice it out, right?

It is definitely glass - I remember when and where I picked it up. I've gotten some of it out, but the rest is deeper than I can go with my trusty needle.

Happy Boxing Day! Thanks!
posted by heigh-hothederryo at 8:54 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the followup; I always want to know how things turn out.
posted by theora55 at 9:20 AM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

> Even it is staffed with nurse-practitioners or PAs, they should still try to slice it out, right?

Yes, I've had a similar thing dealt with by a PA.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:33 AM on December 26, 2019

Response by poster: Update:
Went to my doctor's office today. After some discussion amongst the PAs, they declined to cut into my foot, and referred me to the local foot-and-ankle doctor. I will try the home remedies over the weekend, and see the foot doc on Monday.

The PA mentioned I might get X-rayed, which seems overkill for such a tiny bit of glass, but here we are.

I'll update again on Monday. Thanks again!
posted by heigh-hothederryo at 9:45 AM on December 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The PA mentioned I might get X-rayed, which seems overkill for such a tiny bit of glass, but here we are.

I was x-rayed as well, partly because the piece of glass was so small. They tried looking at my foot with the naked eye first to see if they could see the glass sticking out; when they couldn't, they looked at it with a magnifying glass. They still couldn't see it, so they x-rayed my foot to get a handle on where it was - or even if it was glass. They explained that if it was glass it should show up on the X-ray, but if it didn't show up, it might be something else, like wood.

In my case, they didn't see anything, but that was more because that's how small the piece of glass in my foot was in the first place. My doctor confessed that he briefly thought there might be something psychosomatic going on in my case, but like two seconds later thought "Nah, she seems really insistent" and only found the glass in my foot by making that incision. He cut really carefully, and he said that when he made that incision he felt a little thing scrape against the side of the blade. I even heard him say "I'll be darned" when it happened.

....Clearly, you will end up with a renewed fascination into "how much physical trouble a tiny piece of glass can end up causing you" as has happened with me. :-)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:02 AM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Saw the foot doctor, had X-rays. Glass does not show up on X-rays, but she could feel it under the skin. So, numbing injection to the sole of my foot (highly recommended, but quite painful - and I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing).

She thinks she got it out. It no longer feels like I'm stepping on glass, so I think she did!

Out of pocket cost was hefty, as I haven't met my deductible yet. But worth it to be able to walk normally.

Thanks, everyone!
posted by heigh-hothederryo at 4:26 PM on January 3, 2020 [5 favorites]