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Dog Eats Man's Toe and Saves His Life
Have you ever been so drunk that you passed out and your dog ate your toe? I haven't either, but luckily for Michigander Jerry Douthett, he has. It turns out Jerry has type 2 diabetes and a wound on his toe had becoming dangerously infected. After a night of drinking Jerry passed out in his chair and the family dog Kiko decided to do a little doggy doctoring. From the article: "'The toe was gone,' said Douthett. 'He ate it. I mean, he must have eaten it, because we couldn't find it anywhere else in the house. I look down, there's blood all over, and my toe is gone.' [Douthett's wife] Rosee, 40, rushed her husband to the hospital where she's a gerontology nurse — Spectrum Health's Blodgett Campus. Kiko had gnawed to a point below the nail-line. When tests revealed an infection to the bone, doctors amputated what was left of the toe."
If it was necrotic, he would have lost all feeling in the tissue. Same deal with destructive frostbite.
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This is still done in hospitals, particularly for bad burns. The Green Bottle Fly is most often used, as the maggots will only eat dead flesh, and do not excrete waste. Only after they pupate and metamorphose into flies do they excrete, thus the larvae are essentially sterile.
The pharmacy at the local hospital grows such larvae in sterile environments just for such use. In the field you won't have all those advantages, but it's absolutely an option.
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Those are usually specially raised, sterile medical maggots, often in a dressing designed to keep them from escaping; but the principle is the same.
From the article, he had been hiding it from his wife for a while. After she saw it, she suspected diabetes, but he had resisted seeing a doctor due to the fear of a diagnosis. Lots of stupid stuff on his part. Not so many on the wife's.
Human urine is quite sterile, believe it or not.
And, for some reason, this is my second post about urine today. What the hell?
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The reason he didn't feel his dog eating his toe is not just that he was drunk, but because diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. When you have severe untreated diabetes, you often can't feel pain in your extremities, and untreated sores become gangrenous. So his being drunk was the least of his problems, his bigger problem was that his toe was decomposing and he couldn't feel it.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
It is technically possible for this to happen, There probably was little feeling in his foot.
This is what a foot looks like in a diabetic patient (warning - gross).
This is a moderate case. This can occur to the ankles.
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