Do you suffer from an ingrown toenail? Wearing tight shoes or cutting your toenail wrong could have caused your ingrown toenail. Either way, an ingrown toenail can be quite painful. After much suffering, you can rush to the doctor to get the ingrown toenail removed, just to suffer more pain from the toenail removal. The cost of getting the ingrown toenail removed only adds to the pain, so why not cure your own ingrown toenail with these easy steps?
Get immediate relief from the infection. Your red toe likely bulges from the infection inside the ingrown toenail, so sterilize a pair of scissors that have long, thin blades. Once you have sterilized the tips of the blades with alcohol, open up the scissors and use one of the scissor’s points to pull the skin back away from the toenail. All you have to do is insert the sterilized tip into the side (between the toe and the nail) and use the scissor blade to pull the toe out from the nail. Chances are some infection will drain out from the infected toe, relieving you of some of the pain, but don’t try digging the toenail out. This might only make it worse. Use peroxide to boil as much infection as you can out of the side of your toe and then clean away the infection. Be sure to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, afterwards.
Pack the side of the toe. Once you have gotten your toe to release some of the infection, you will likely have a little bit of room to pack your toe. You might not be able to pack it much, but any packing will help because it will hold the toe away from the toenail, giving you some relief from the pain and allowing some of the infection (even though minute) to escape. To pack your toe, go ahead and again sterilize the thin scissor blades with alcohol and take a tiny bit of toilet tissue (use white) and place it on top of the side of your infected toe. Use the scissor point to wedge the toilet tissue between the toe and the toenail. You can even wet it with alcohol to help with the infection. The smell will not be pleasant, though, because you are dealing with an infected ingrown toenail, so be ready.
Cut a V in your toenail. Now that you have gotten some immediate relief from the infected ingrown toenail, you need to create a way for the infection to continue escaping the toe at a gradual process. You can do this by (again) using the scissor’s tips. Go ahead and sterilize the scissor’s tips one more time and then cut a V (inward) into your toenail, the bigger the V, the better. Chances are, though, your toe is so sore that you can tolerate cutting only a small V into your toenail, but this is okay. The object is to cut a V into your toenail so that your toenail will grow from both sides towards the gap in the nail. This might sound as if it will take a long time, but you will actually feel some relief by morning. As well, you will see that some infection has oozed out, meaning that the nail is moving toward the gap and out of the side of your toe.
Clean daily. When you get up the next morning, you will likely have some crusted over infection and blood on the side of your toe. (You might even want to wear some white socks to bed to avoid getting this drainage on your sheets.) Remove the packing from the side of your toe and boil your toe out again with peroxide. If your toe feels a bit better, and you feel that you could cut a deeper V in the middle of your toe, then do so. A deeper V means quicker drainage. Continue this routine daily until the infection has completely drained from your toe. Once your toenail has grown out of the side of your toe, you can trim off what you need to trim off. To keep from getting another ingrown toenail, though, you must be careful to cut your toenail straight across (once you have cured your ingrown toenail), and it wouldn’t hurt to cut a tiny V in your toenail just to make sure that your toenail doesn’t get ingrown again.
