Fighting My Nail Fungus

This is a little more background on my nail fungus and some of the things i resorted to early on. At first the fungus wasn't very bad, it covered about a third of my nail. I consider myself lucky - I only have it on one nail, many people suffer from fungus in several nails. Even though only one nail was infected, I did have a fungus that was on the skin early on as well. I soon found that the entire toe and much of my foot itched and burned.

I tried several over the counter (OTC) products which gave me some releif, but they were unable to get rid of the nail fungus or the foot fungus entirely. These fungi are definatly a hardy variety. I went through several cans of Tinactin or other brand sprays, yet the fungus would not go away.

Due to my frustration in this ongoing battle and a growing sense of desparation, I began to expirement. I discovered that by using my pocketknife, I could scrape away much of the fungus from my skin. I was scraping off the top layer of dead skin and I assume some fungus was coming off with it - it probably was. Besides making my foot red and sore, this scraping combined with sprays was able to remove the fungus from my foot, I rarely have a problem with it now. Even if it hadn't gotten rid of the foot fungus, it sure felt good to give it such a good scratch.

Now bear in mind, this did not remove the nail fungus - I still fight that problem to this day. I will also mention that when I used my knife, I would sometimes cause spots on my foot to bleed. I would never apply the antifungal agents to my foot if I had any open sores, I felt that was too much of a risk. I feel inclined to mention that You should not scrape your fungus with a knife and you should not spray anti-fungal medications on open sores - doing so may be a risk to your health.

My nail was still infected. I figured I would use the knife on the nail - I cut away at it and applied sprays. However, the nail fungus would always come back. I completely removed the nail at one point. When it grew back the fungus was in the whole nail, not just a third of it as before. I can only conclude that by removing the nail completely, the fungus was able to spread deeper into the nail bed.

I let the nail grow back uninhibited for a while - the nail had a thick ugly gray matter built up under it and was raised somewhat. It also began to cause some pain. Enough was enough. I repeated the process of removing and cutting the nail again with some variations. I also experimented with bleaching the nail bed, soak it in apple cider vinegar, and scraping the bed.

Now my nail looks better than before, the fungus is not as dense or discolored as before. It is currently a splotch white nail. I think I will soon likely begin another round of treatments and document the day to day changes on this blog as I go - with photos of course. Let's hope it works this time.