Bloody Toe NASTINESS!

Holworthy resident Evan N. Rachlin ‘05 was just a normal first-year on Tuesday, Sept. 18. To be more specific, he was one in a rush to get to his 1 p. m. physics section. Wearing a pair of flip-flops, Evan grabbed his blue North Face backpack with his left hand as he was going out the door. One of the waist strap buckles got stuck on his left big toe, and when he swung the backpack up to his shoulder, it “completely ripped off the left side of my toenail and, like, it hurt.”

Nevertheless, Rachlin continued going down the stairs until he felt his toe sticking to his sandals. He looked down to see blood; the left side of his toenail wrenched forward and back. “It was kind of dark, so I poked it and blood squirted up—not just from the left side but everywhere,” Evan adds. Section wasn’t going to happen, so Evan went back to his room and tried to shift the toenail back in place. But it just slid around, and he covered his foot and flip-flops in blood. So he went into the shower to wash it off and fainted from loss of blood.

After he revived, he dragged himself to UHS, “who were wonderful.” A surgeon removed the toenail and wrapped the toe up in gauze. For a while Evan had to wear handmade stylish footgear on his left foot—he attached a duct tape strap to his flip-flops because the layers of gauze made his foot too big to fit in anything else. Now he can wear normal shoes and play soccer using his left foot. The toenail is a little stub about a quarter of an inch wide, and “should be grown by January.”

The one-month anniversary of Evan’s accident was Tuesday. Make a pilgrimage to Holworthy and view the toenail, a desiccated grayish brown chip in a orange pill vial. Evan’s final thought on the accident: “I guess not all pain is gain.”