Naughty toes

In the early days of my mission in Brazil I had surgery on my toes. I had arrived in Brazil on Wednesday morning, December 18, 1968. Thursday night I took a bus all alone to Petrópolis, a city in the mountains about an hour and a half by bus from Rio de Janeiro. There I met my first companion, Elder Dean Slade from Las Vegas. I was just beginning my mission. He was about to finish his.

As we were preparing for bed that first night, my companion noticed that the big toe on my right foot was all red, inflamed, and infected. That was not good, he concluded, with all the walking missionaries do, with the humid climate, with the rainy season coming on.

Elder Slade called the mission president that night and the next day he took me back down to Rio, where we went to Hospital Silvestre, a clean, well-equiped hospital run by the Seventh-Day Adventists that had doctors and nurses who actually spoke English. I wasn't very fluent in Portuguese yet. That Friday afternoon, December 20, I had my toe operated on and the nail completely removed from my right big toe.

For the next week I convalesced in the mission home. I was supposed to stay off my foot for the most part. The incessant pain helped me do that. I celebrated my first Brazilian Christmas as a patient lying on a bed or hopping around in the mission home. During that week I also kept reviewing the missionary discussions in Portuguese, read James E. Talmage's Jesus the Christ again, read nearly half of President David O. McKay's Man May Know for Himself, typed the entire new mission handbook onto stencil so that it could be mimeographed for the missionaries, and visited the hospital every other day for bandage changes.

Finally, on the evening of Saturday, December 28, I returned to Petrópolis. Elder Slade was grateful to have a companion again. I still had a bandage on my toe and had to wear sandals rather than shoes.

A little over a month later, on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, Elder Slade and I returned to Rio. He was on his way home to the United States. I was merely going to the hospital to have my toe checked and planned to return to Petrópolis that afternoon. My companion went with me to the hospital, where shortly thereafter I came out without a toenail on my left big toe.

I reflected that the first day and the last day that Elder Slade was my companion he had been with me in the hospital watching me lose toenails. I said my final good-bye to him from on my back in a bed in the mission home. He had been a good companion, one that I relied on heavily for help with my lessons and the language. He gave me a good start on my mission.

The next morning, after an overnight stay in the mission home, I returned alone to Petrópolis to prepare to transfer to the Tijuca area of Rio de Janeiro. That change came as quite a shock. I had been in Petrópolis only six weeks. Perhaps the president wanted me a little closer to the hospital, a little closer where he could keep an eye on my toes.

I was supposed to go with the other two elders in Petrópolis to the neighboring town of Teresópolis for the evening when they went over there for Mutual. One of the elders was the branch president in Teresópolis, and he and his companion traveled over there a couple times a week. As mentioned, I was supposed to go with them. But when I got back to Petrópolis, they had left me a note informing me they had already gone.

I spent the rest of the day alone, somewhat frightened at being alone. I stayed in my room at the boarding place, the pensão where we lived, being careful with my foot, packing, preparing instructions for those continuing after me, finishing my part of the district history, writing in my journal, catching up a bit of delinquent correspondence, and such. Sometime that evening I poured out my soul in prayers of thanksgiving and pleading. My eyes were wet. And my toe down there throbbing with pain at the end of my leg did not even seem to matter at that moment.

And so the next day, Friday, I was off to Rio and my new assignment with a new companion. And with a throbbing toe.

"Last Friday evening," I wrote in my journal on Wednesday, February 12, "I had an experience that deepened my appreciation for the Savior's atoning sacrifice and demonstrated the weaknesses of the flesh. I was changing the bandage on my toe for the first time since the operation and the pain, because of sticking to the raw skin where the toenail used to be, became so unbearable that I blacked out right there on the bed. It was only a few seconds but had Elder Sarager [my new companion in Tijuca] a bit worried."

I wished afterward that Elder Sarager had finished ripping the bandage off while I was out. Unfortunately, he did not. After I recovered a bit, I still had to deal with getting the sticking gauze the rest of the way off. The pain was horrendous.

I continued in my journal: "How weak we are! The Savior suffered such intense pain in Gethsemane, causing bleeding at the pores, that my experience is weak in comparison. His was for hours, mine only minutes. His was more than physical pain, mine only that. Yet Jesus Christ fainted not but perfected His Father's plan. For this experience I am grateful and can appreciate and understand a little more clearly now.

"Health is a beautiful and one of our most valuable gifts from our Father in Heaven. Like too many blessings we often do not appreciate it until it is taken from us or we forfeit the right to have it. If I have not yet learned another thing from my mission, I do know that health should be jealously guarded with good sense and the proper measure of faith. We must be clean that bear the vessels of the Lord."

That should have been enough in the toe department. But that was not to be.

Nearly nine months later, on Monday, October 27, 1969, I wrote in my journal, "Today turned into one of those days when all sorts of things happen to make life look different and exciting. Making a visit to Hospital Sil­vestre, I learned from Dr. Kovach that my cold was really bronchitis. An infection that started in my right big toe again last week, ten months after the operation on it, required the toenail to be removed again. I was told that the problem was not really ingrown toenail problems but a fungus of some type on the toenail. For all this I have been given medicines of all shapes, colors, and forms: one taken every four hours, another every 12 hours, another three times daily, another every day at lunch for 40 days. The worst part of the whole experience was calling President Johnson to give him the good news and writing my family to give them something to worry about."

Enough with toes already.