Japan 2013: Episode 13

June 17

Coral Under Foot

As promised, the rest of the story about Olivia's poor foot.

As you remember, Sunday morning we took a swim at the South beach at Okuma, with soft sand like the other beach but more bits of coral washed up by the tide. Olivia stepped on one of these pieces of coral and hurt her foot. We spent the rest of the day hiking up to Hiji Falls and around Cape Hedo. By the end of the day, Olivia's feet were pretty sore. 

On Monday morning Jim went in to work to keep tabs on a project. Olivia woke to an increasingly sore foot, but now it was clear it wasn't just from the walking. Just below the ball of her left foot, the cut seemed to have something embedded. We discussed trying to investigate the injury ourselves, and decided ultimately this was a job for the Professionals and headed out to the Naval Hospital at Camp Foster, about a 25 minute drive.

Once arrived at the hospital, the staff were wonderfully pleasant and the wait short. Olivia had an X-Ray to see if any coral was stuck in her foot. The X-ray showed no foreign objects, but a visual examination proved there was something in there very near the surface of the foot. We had two options:
1) Wait for the object to be naturally pushed out by the body. This option is non-invasive, but the risk of infection by sea injuries is rather high, and the antibiotic regimen for such infection is pretty extensive - 3 pills 3 times per day for 10 days.
2) Use local anesthesia and cut out whatever might be in there. This option would require an injection to apply the anesthesia and possibly longer recovery time from any cutting. It would however allow the opportunity to clean the area thoroughly and reduce potential infection.
Olivia was against the use of needles, but I decided it would be better to reduce the chance of infection by removing the troublesome coral. The hardest part was applying the lidocane, which required a few injections around the sore area to insure it all was numbed. After the anesthesia set in, the doctor was able to open the wound and discovered no coral, rather a small infection had already set in creating a pocket of pustule. He was very thorough to remove any potentially infectious matter and cleaned the injured foot well before bandaging Liv up. The whole procedure took maybe 20 minutes. Once we were cleared to leave, with a bottle of Motrin and Tylenol from the pharmacy (just walk up with the Doctor's note and they give it to you for free!) we headed out. We grabbed some lunch at A&W and an ice cream I had promised Liv for being tough through the injection. Her new favorite flavor seems to be benimo (sweet potato).

After dinner we tried some yummy Chinsuko cookies - like a sugar cookie.  This variety pack contains: Sugar cane/brown sugar (brown, top left), Maple (red, bottom left), coconut (blue, middle top), Benimo (purple cookies with green wrapper, bottom middle), Pineapple (red, top right) and original (blue, bottom right).