Cut on bottom of foot causing pain

by Anna
(Hiram, Ga)

I have a tumor on the bottom of both my feet they ate right beside my arch, last week I stepped on a small piece of glass right in the middle of the right tumor , the glass remained in for two days because when my husband and i examined it after cleaning it we couldnt see it,the cut was about the width of a pinky nail, during the two days i stayed off my foot as much as possible because it was painful to walk on it, I boiled it out with peroxide a couple of times a day but I began to feel that there was something in my foot because it hurt up in the wound, my sister in law was over and I asked her to look at it for me using a bright lite and magnifying glass she saw glass imbedded in the cut and using sterilized needle and tweezers she was able to carefully and slowly remove the tiny piece of glass, I continued to boil it out and applied neosporin for the next 3 days and covered it although the bandage kept wearing off, at the end of the third day it became very painful and inflamed now I cantt walk on it and it its still very painful. what do you think is this any kind of normal?

RESPONSE

Hi Anna,

Nothing about pain and inflammation is normal. I am curious as to what kind of tumor you have in your feet, if I had to guess I would think a plantarfibroma but that is only a guess.
Anyway, a couple of things come to mind. The most probable is that you are developing an infection in the area. That would be the most common cause of an increase in pain in spite of having removed the broken glass.
The next obvious thought is that you did not get out all of the glass. I see this in the office all the time. People tell me they removed whatever they stepped on, but upon examination and probing in many instances I find additional foreign body.
That leaves us with the third possibility and that is you did some damage to the "tumor" in your foot. If you indeed have a plantarfibroma or any other soft tissue growth of some sort, it may have been partially penetrated by the glass and now what was once a growth that was relatively pain free is now painful.
In the case of a plantarfibroma which is probably the most common soft tissue tumor on the bottom of the foot, the growth is thought to be formed by a herniation of the thick plantarfascial ligament through the covering over the ligament. Thus a sharp penetration of this herniation in theory as least could cause pain.
What you need to look at here is how bad is the inflammation around the original wound. If the redness is getting worse, perhaps there is even drainage coming out of the wound, then there is a real possibility that the wound is infected.
If the area is only mildly red and the redness is not worsening then you may go on the working assumption that there is either still glass in the foot or the "tumor" has been pierced.
Obviously, the best way to find out what is really going on there is to see a foot specialist in your area. You do not want to see a relatively simple problem become a much more involved one. All I am doing is just guessing since I do not have the luxury of actually examining you.

Marc Mitnick DPM
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