John Will Rambo

Sensitive readers, beware! This post might not be suited for you.

You are probably all too familiar with the following scenes in an average Hollywood action movie. A hero has just been shot cowardly in the back by a brutal villain, but then manages to escape by elegantly wire-starting a car and swiftly  shaking off his enemies—who got hold of a car by brutally dragging an innocent driver from it—in a breathtaking pursuit. However, as our hero is hiding for the police because of a major conspiracy including a dozen U.S. senators and a Russian cold-blooded serial killer at loose, he cannot just walk into the nearest hospital’s intensive care unit and ask for a decent treatment.

No, our hero will have to take care of himself. (He cannot ask his dazzling girlfriend for any help either, as this would seriously endanger her. Moreover, his best—black—mate has just disappeared mysteriously because of some shady love affair. The colleagues at his agency aren’t any good either: some are compromised and there is a breach in the agency’s security network so that his profile has been widely spread on the Internet now, scaring away the remaining ones who he could possibly still have trusted.)

Therefore, at dusk he walks into one of these American pharmacy ‘supermarkets’ (open 24/7) with his hat drawn deep over his face  and goes like: “I’m gonna need two liters of pure alcohol, a couple of sterile scalpels, a pair of pliers, a box of cotton wool, five candles, matches and oh yeah, throw in a bottle of vodka too! Actually, make that two bottles.” Afterwards, our hero withdraws to a dimly-lit, shabby room somewhere in a backward neighborhood to set about the horrifying task of removing the bullet, himself being on the brink of collapse as can be clearly seen from the sweat pearling on his pale forehead.

That’s more or less what I’ve been through lately—although the context was slightly different. Due to my minor accident of last Sunday, my left big toe (that is, the one on my left foot, which happens to be the rightmost toe on that foot, which, however, does not make it any less my left big toe) was still severely swollen. The problem—and this is a nasty detail which might be skipped by the aforementioned sensitive reader—was that a lot of fluid was captured under my toe nail. And that pressure hurts—badly. (It occurred to me that the guy who came up with pulling out nails as a torture method in the Dark Ages must have been in a similar situation.)

Anyhow, consulting the Internet quickly turned up the right remedy: heating a needle until it is glowing red, and simply poking a hole in the nail such that the fluid is drained. On YouTube you can actually even find some demonstrations of this technique.

If by now you have lost the parallel with the above described movie scenes: I did not want to go to the hospital for nothing as I rather spend my money elsewhere, my girlfriend couldn’t do it as she is some 10.000 km away, Jimmy left with his girlfriend Angelique for L.A. and Las Vegas and my colleagues? Honestly, have you read my previous post?

So there I was in the kitchen, at 1 Am, gathering enough courage to stab this red-hot needle through my toe nail. I left out the vodka as I had to go to work the day after, so no sedatives for me. However, I was not yet familiar with the technique. Therefore, I did not know how much pressure to apply to get through the nail, at the same time not applying too much pressure because under the nail was still my toe… Anyhow, I managed it quite well in the end.

Remains the pharmacy. I needed chloramine to disinfect the foot and ibuprofen pills to further reduce the risk of infection. So I limped to ‘Walgreens,’ one of those supermarket-pharmacies. However, the pharmacist behind the counter had never before heard of chloramine, although I think that it is a pretty common molecule. So I asked for a similar product, anything that you can dissolve into water to disinfect. However, such a thing did not exist to her knowledge. Explaining her that I did know that it existed because I remembered having read about it a thousand times between my ages 7 and 13 in  my ‘SAS survival book’ (pink pills, one per liter water to disinfect it for drinking, two to render the water safe for cleaning wounds and three to obtain an antiseptic solution—I am not sure about these details, so don’t try it at home) did not help either. Finally I ended up buying some regular disinfectant that I guessed would do the trick.

The ibuprofen though is another story: yes, they did have that. Aisle 7. This did not mean that the ibuprofen could be found in aisle 7. No, aisle 7 is the ibuprofen aisle:

I do not have a wide-angle camera so I could not capture the whole expanse of ibuprofen products but believe me: there were a lot of them. So I set about picking the right one—somewhere knowing that it was all exactly the same molecule, even ‘Advil’ and ‘Motrin,’ which are just brand names, and I suspect ‘Tylenol’ to be more of the same too.

Concluding, quite a contrast between the absence of what should be a rather dull and common compound, and the abundance of a best-selling product with which you can fill a whole aisle.

Anyhow, my toe seems to be fine now, and I have a new story for long cafe-evenings and family-gatherings. However, I see that I have written a quite extensive post here. I promise to be a little bit more succinct in the future…