Wounds Talking Now

Hi, we’re the wounds on your legs and feet.  Have you noticed pain in your legs or feet, dry and flakey skin, or that there is no hair on your legs? Are your toenails thick and are there scabs on your toes? Maybe you’ve also noticed that your toes and feet turn red and blue when you hang them down and pale white when you put them up, or that your feet or toes feel cold. These are all signs that you need to tell your doctor about us.  If you don’t and he or she doesn’t find us soon, we will likely get worse and infected.

If we aren’t going away, it’s because we need oxygen to heal.  Just as you need oxygen to breathe, providing us with oxygen will help blood get through the tiny *blood vessels, so we can heal and you can feel and look better again.

Blood gets to us, your wounds, through your blood vessels. The blood vessels on the leg and foot are farthest away from the heart.  This makes it hard to get enough blood flow to wounds. Also, people with high blood sugar often have clogged and hardened blood vessels, which also makes it harder for blood to get to us.  There are large blood vessels that go down the leg to bring blood to your foot.  Then the blood travels through tiny blood vessels to get to your skin.

It is like watering your lawn. There is a large hose which carries the water out to the grass.  Then a sprinkler carries smaller amounts of water to each blade of grass. If not enough water comes out, the grass would dry up and die.  That is the same thing that happens to people with high blood sugar.  The small blood vessels become blocked and they are unable to carry blood to us and help your skin to heal.

There are many ways your doctor can find out how serious we are. He or she can take X-rays or check the blood pressure of your toes.  They could also put little sticker with electrodes on the skin near us to tell them how much oxygen we have and if we have the right amount of blood flow to heal without oxygen helping us along.

We had a friend who was a wound on this nice lady who had high blood sugar. The lady’s doctor recognized right away that he would need to test the oxygen levels.  Within 15 minutes of placing electrodes on the skin near our friend, the wound, the doctor knew that our friend didn’t have good oxygen.

The doctor sent the nice lady to a place called an outpatient wound care center where they checked her oxygen numbers and found she could benefit from hyperbaric oxygen therapy. They placed her in a clear cylinder, called a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. The lady told the technician at the center that it felt just like lying on her sofa at home. They even had a TV in the chamber.

Once in the hyperbaric chamber, our friend, the wound, felt things were going to change. In no time at all, the lady started feeling much better. Tiny, new blood vessels were forming and growing inside our wound friend. The doctor said the oxygen she received in the chamber helped grow the new blood vessels. Within a week, our friend started to look healthy and red and, the new blood flow was also helping to kill off some of the germs that were using up oxygen and nutrients. After a couple weeks, our wound friend started to get smaller and smaller….we knew it was time for us to say goodbye. Not long after our visit, the doctor put some skin on top of our friend and after a week or two more of oxygen treatments, our wound was gone forever.