Today I was back in the clinic, but in a new office! It was just Dr. Logel in the office today, so things ran much smoother. I was there from 8 to 4:30 and probably saw close to 40 patients. My favorite thing that I saw today was a patient that came in who said that her third toe was constantly numb. This is called neuropathy, where a nerve in between the toes is swollen and causes the toe to go numb. The cure to neuropathy is to surgically remove the nerve in between the toes, but this patient was not to the point of wanting the surgery. However, later in the day, another patient came in who had actually recently had this nerve removal surgery, so I got to see the effects of it. With this surgery, your toe is permanently numb, but any pain that was there is gone, as you can’t feel anything. She was saying how it felt as if she was walking on rocks though, as she had just recently had the surgery and some of the branching nerves were still confused as to where their main nerve went. On the topic of numbness, a rare case came in where the patients whole foot has been numb for 7 years since he had a ruptured achilles’ tendon repair in 2012. Dr. Logel was bewildered by this case as there was no definitive answer to his problems and the only thing to do was just live with it. Besides having abnormally numb patients today, I also saw many broken ankles, hurt achilles’ tendons, and even two casts. It was cool to stay and see the whole day with Dr. Logel and I was able to start and put bits and pieces of my knowledge together!
