Result: disaster.

Things just happen.

See the story about a diabetic lady from Melbourne, Florida, who is suing a manicure shop for a botched pedicure that ultimately resulted in the surgical amputation of 2 toes due to gangrene. It’s just an unfortunate occurrence. Who’s at fault? Hard to say…

Diabetic neuropathy

A lot of patients who are told for the first time that they are diabetic have this couldn’t-care-less attitude. This is because they were unable to fathom in the first place the seriousness of the situation, that they could potentially suffer heart attacks or strokes much more easily, that they could face kidney failure and ultimate dialysis, that they might lose limbs due to numbness and infection in diabetic neuropathy, etc. Face it, very often in the beginning they feel perfectly normal, so the worry is not there.

Sometimes one has to present pretty morbid pictures of a diabetic foot with infected ulcers and bone infection and gangrene due to diabetic neuropathy before the realization strikes the diabetic that he or she could also conceivably face the same problem. For example the recent newspaper report that an Illinois woman who had lost sensation in her toes because of diabetic nerve damage woke up one morning and found her right big toe missing, because her pet dog had chewed it off while she was sleeping. And there was no pain. The poor dog had to be put away because of safety concerns (there’s a good possibility it could have got to like the taste of raw human toe).

Diabetic neuropathy

I have seen diabetics who have to keep looking at the ground where they are walking, because the sensation in both feet is gone, and they do not know where their feet are placed on the ground, thus exposing them to a much higher risk of stumbling and falling on uneven ground.

The unfortunate thing about diabetic neuropathy is that the damage to the nerve, thought to be perhaps nutritional in nature, is just not easily reversible or correctable to any extent.