By: Michael Zapf, DPM, MPH, FACFAS, FACFAOM

One of the happy coincidences of joining the Westlake Village Sunrise Rotary club was getting reacquainted with Eric. I remembered meeting him several years before as a patient in my office. When I met him as a patient he was an insurance neophyte and a recent graduate from California Lutheran University. He had what we in the podiatry business refer to technically as some really ugly ingrown nails. He had them for a long time, he said, and wanted to get rid of them permanently. In the office, on his first visit, we did just that. Under local anesthesia thin edges of the nail plate were removed and that portion of the nail root behind the nail edge was killed with a chemical. It is something podiatrists do regularly and Eric was thrilled to find the whole process so easy and painless. Only recently has he come to realize how much this little procedure changed his life.

Eric recently had a reunion of sorts with a couple of his college roommates. They all shared their memories of living together. The strongest memory of Eric, in the minds of all three of his roommates, was his monthly bathroom surgery session. Eric, they remembered, would take his little bag of surgical tools into the bathroom, lock the door and spend an hour moaning and groaning working on his ingrown nails. He would eventually emerge, pedally bandaged, with a satisfied look of victory in his eyes. The victory was short lived, however, for a month later they would find him locked away, again. While Eric thought nothing of these sessions, he was giving his friends memories for life.

This is the kind of courage men find commendable and his roommates tolerated (and maybe even admired) Eric’s endurance. This particular behavior, however, is not something that endears one to a spouse. Soon after graduation Eric secured a real job and a real girlfriend. He knew his bathroom surgery days were numbered and thus found himself in my office.

Eric recently told me this story and gave me permission (actually he begged me) to write about it. Again, he told me how happy he is not to need these monthly sessions. But I bet it is nothing compared to how happy his wife feels. I may have saved a marriage with this little office procedure.

(Rotary, by the way, is an international service organization dedicated to making the neighborhood and the words a better place. There are tens of thousands of clubs worldwide and we have 5 right here in the Conejo Valley. I would encourage anyone interested in service to the community to give me a call. Our Rotary clubs have a unique way of recognizing achievement among the members by assigning them a fine. I bet that all of these nice things I am saying about Rotary will not get me exempted from the next fine session. Luckily it is all for charity.)