This stupid foot injury of mine. It started out back in late October when I helped a friend move. Knowing I'd be doing a lot of walking I wore my most comfortable shoes. Unfortunately they're not the most supportive and at some point carrying boxes across her gravel driveway I started experiencing
The pain continued for a couple weeks until I finally called my foot doc. Unable to return from her vacation just to see moi, I settled on my family doc. He diagnosed me with tendinitis in my foot, which seemed entirely reasonable since I've already had it in both elbows and both shoulders. He sent me home with orders to stay off it for a week and a note for work saying I had to wear tennis shoes basically forever. He refused to put an end date on it, saying that he did not understand why businesses insist that people wear shoes that are unhealthy for their feet.
Preach it Brother!!!
So I stayed off of it for a weekend, and I wore sneakers for a couple weeks, and everything seemed better so I went back to business as usual.
But roughly mid-February the pain returned. I actually went to the foot doc this time. She took x-rays, saw nothing, and got on board the tendinitis train. She told me to stay off the elliptical, wear sneakers, and try to stay off it as much as possible.
I stayed off the elliptical and wore sneakers. I kind of forgot about the last part.
I went back in two weeks and told her I didn't think it was tendinitis. I'm far too familiar with that bitch, and this aint her. She assured me it was, because my x-rays looked fine. She offered me a cortisone shot, which I refused. It was a temporary fix for my elbows so why would it help my foot? I continued to wear sneakers and stay off the elliptical. I tried to stay off the foot but since that meant making The Boy actually, yaknow, DO stuff, it was difficult and frankly more unpleasant than the pain, so I continued to do far more walking than I should.
And it kept getting worse.
So finally at my third biweekly appointment, after saying once again "This does not feel like tendinitis. It feels BROKEN", I agreed to the cortisone shot. And I agreed to keep it elevated, stay off it for all but the barest of necessities, and I worked from home for the remainder of the week. Who am I to argue? I'm not a doctor.
Except that it continued to get worse.
My physical therapist was the one who finally encouraged me to seek a second opinion.
So when the radiologist at the orthopedist's office said "Want to see?" and I hobbled around the protective wall to look at the screen, what to my wandering eyes should appear but a break that any moron could see. But not being an expert I pointed and said "Um....what's that?" and the radiologist replied "Well I'm no doctor, but it sure looks like a break to me"
Yep...the foot is borked (adj.- broken so entirely that the word to describe it is also effed up.)
The doctor explained to me that I have a Jones Fracture, to which he added "When they name a fracture, it's never good".
WHY doesn't anyone, including me, listen to me?? Why didn't I get a second opinion earlier on? And why am I resisting the urge to hobble to my foot doc's office and plant my crutch firmly in her...
Moving on. Violence is never the answer.
Now the new doc said that even if I had come to him in the first place he probably wouldn't have seen the break on the original x-rays. These types of breaks often don't show when they're new. And what we're seeing now is not so much the break but more the new bone formation. His protocol would have been to send me home with exactly the same instructions I received from my foot doc, BUT when I returned two weeks later reporting continued pain, he would have taken new x-rays, at which point the break would have been visible.
Grrrrr....
The theory is that it was a very slight crack back on October, which caused comparably little pain and healed in a few weeks. BUT there is a 30% to 50% re-injury rate with Jones Fracture, so I re-broke it in February, gradually making it worse until recently when I finally started staying off it, at which point it finally started to heal.
From here on out I need to wear supportive shoes more often than not and I need to continue to lose weight to keep it from re-breaking. Or is it re-re-breaking?
So anyway, I'm on the mend, in a boot and on crutches. Going on day four and the foot feels GREAT...the rest of my body feels like it's been hit by a bus. You guys walking on crutches is HARD. I have bruises on my upper ribs under my arms and the muscles in my chest, arms and even abs feel like I've been abducted and tortured by Jillian Michaels on her period. I spent a good portion of yesterday sitting around feeling sorry for myself because the automatic air freshener in the laundry room has run out and it's just too much trouble to go to the store and get a refill. Seriously EVERYTHING is hard. I sit here in my jammies right now because getting ready to go anywhere feels like an ordeal on par with construction of the pyramids. But I do need to undertake this endeavor because The Boy will be home soon to take his invalid mother out to lunch and to the grocery store.
I'm not sure if it's the fact we now know it's broken or the fact that I could take him down with the swing of a crutch but The Boy's attitude toward helping me has improved and he's no longer accusing me of "milking it" (oh yes he did). So hopefully we can have a nice lunch and get the shopping done without either of us leaving the other at the restaurant or store. We're going to need to figure out how to get along soon because come the end of May we will spend 7 days on a very big boat together, sharing a very tiny room at night. Here's hoping the doc's prediction that I'll be healed by then comes true, and The Boy and I are still talking to each other when the cruise is over.
Today's lunch...something from First Watch.
Foot injuries can only occur because we have feet (or at least a foot).
ReplyDelete