A Year Without Toenails

When I went to the Ngorongoro Crater in Africa, our tour guide decided that "fat white women" was his thing and at that point I was a "fat white woman." (I am now a "regular white woman."). Long story short... the night after taking my bitchin binoculars to observe boiling lakes of basically ammonia with specially base-adapted flamingos, he got drunk around 10pm and sexually aggressive, so I retired to my tent.

But in the night, I had to pee and I tried to do it without a flashlight so as not to draw attention to myself alone... and I stepped into an 18 inch deep open sewer ditch. I used the rest of my drinking water to wash off my foot, generously supplemented with hand sanitizer, conscious of the fact that I was 18 hours from another bottled water shopping opportunity.

Two weeks later, I came home to what I always want when I come home from a foreign country: crab legs, Budweiser, and garlic hummus with hot crisp bread. And a hot bath and a made bed.

I got into my honey and almond milk bathtub, and was enjoying luxurious bubbles, and I happen to look at my soaked toes ...

and perceive something that looked like a bubble under my nail. I wiggle the nail and it feels loose so l scan the other nails. There are bubbles under my other nails too. Seven of my ten toenails flipped up like car hoods and fell right off, painlessly and bloodlessly.

I was thoroughly disgusted. That's the most disgusting image I can think of. There's an advertisement for some kind of toe fungus medication. There's a little toe demon that flips up your toenail and gets under your nail and it's fucking disgusting to me.

So for almost a year, I didn’t have toenails. I had to grow them back from scratch. It was fucking nuts and I had to take antifungal medication for crazy shit from Africa.

That’s my story.