I have that too. My right toe nail bed turns a blueish color for me even when waking sitting. It's the pooling of the blood due to the valves being damaged. These are one way valves back to the heart that are damaged by the clot material from the DVT. My vascular sugeon told me that your body has redundancy built in the venous system so the blood finds it's way back to the heart but it tends to pool in the lower extremeties. There is also a condition involving purple toe that is an effect from the anticoagulant drugs such as
heparin called purple toe where it is caused from the medication. Usually this is early on in your treatment and for some reason I don't understand isn't associated with ongoing treatment. Aching feeling is also something I get. It's really a terrible aching at time in the toe bit is also in my whole foot and ankle. It's like an arthritic type aching that is beyond imagination. The inside or your veins have just gone through a major trauma from the clots and they don't just dissappear overnight. This affects alot of tissue including nerves downstream as well as upstream from your clot. Ask a good vascular surgeon. Mine painted a pretty bleak picture of the future for DVT sufferers saying the clot material stays in the vein and basicacally causes havoc in the way of post thrombotic syndrome. But my general doctor told me a more encouraging story of how the clots are either absorbed or fuse to the sides of the vein? But she did say the valves can or do remain damaged which is why we need to raise our legs to promote the blood flow back to the heart. Also everyone says
exercise because with movement you're actually pushing the blood through the veins and this movement is good for their proper functioning-moving the blood basically back to the heart. Remember the venous system has no pump to move the blood like your arterial system- the heart moves the blood through our arteries by pump pressure!. Movement that causes squeezing of the veins is the main thing moving blood through the veins. The veins have no pump, hence as us DVT sufferers know the blood tends to clot when it slows down in speed and we get thrombi forming which cascades into potentially a lot of our unpleasant, painful and life threatening experiences.
Hope this helps.
