This is a condition which occurs when external stimuli causes the floorplate to be injured and induce internal bleeding. There are cases where the condition naturally gets better, the nail falls off, or one has to wait for the nail grow to a healthy length.
How to deal with it
If the bleeding is small, leaving it to wait for new nail to grow is fine. Depending the location of injury, the duration of growth may even range from 6 months to a year. It takes a long time. If one can’t wait for that period of time, placing a nail cover can hide the hematoma when in public.
However, pain can be felt with extreme bleeding and formation of large blood clumps. To reduce the pain and condition the blood has to removed. The most common method for this is to create a sanitised hole in the nail with a needle to drain the blood. There are no nerves in the nail so no pain will be felt during this procedure.
However, some form of pressure will be applied to the nail floor plate when creating the hole. Pain can be felt when applying this pressure, especially if the region has internal bleeding. The procedure is best done with medical specialist using local anaesthetics.
Furthermore, there are cases where the region with th hematoma starts to dig into the skin like an ingrown toenail. This may result in inflammation of the surrounding skin. Cases like this usually result in high levels of pain with discharge and infection occurring around the region of inflammation.
As long as ingrowth doesn’t occur its best to leave the condition until a new nail grows from the base. If the nail starts to develop abnormal growth please visit a specialist immediately.
