True, it was my honeymoon. But I didn't think the ball and chain dragging off my ankle would hurt like that so soon. No, I figured I'd just sprained it or something and I'd be all right in a week.
No such luck.
The pain was an off and on sort of thing, but each time it came back, it grew. After two years of trying to deny it really hurt and then wish it away, I finally decided it was worth burdening Canada's overburdened health care system with.
Plantar fasciitis. In both heels.
Little wonder, really. If you look at the contributing factors to this ailment, you paint a very lifelike portrait of Ken Breadner:
- Overweight, check. I used to be drastically underweight, but the "freshman 20" in my case was closer to a "freshman hundred"...and I've never managed to get it off.
- A job that requires a lot of walking or standing on hard surfaces...does concrete count? For eight to ten hours a day?
- Tight calf muscles that limit how far the ankles can stretch. I'm tight freakin' everywhere. I have no flexibility in anything and "stretch" is a very strong curse word in my world..
- High arches. Yeah, baby, yeah. My arches are so high I caused eyes to widen and jaws to drop at the othopaedist's office that first time.
- Improper walking technique. Yup, I'll admit it: I never learned to walk properly. If you look at an old pair of my shoes, you very quickly notice that the inside edges of tread are worn away, while the outsides look like new. Apparently this is impossible to correct at this late date.
So they did three things. They sent me for physio, which I blew off almost immediately because they told me to "stretch" and I responded in kind, telling them to "go fuck themselves". They prescribed a night splint, which is a rigid hard plastic bootlike thing that holds my foot perpendicular to my leg while I sleep. And they fitted me with orthotics.
The night brace took some getting used to. I initially found it very hard to sleep with it weighing my left leg down. Eventually, though, it got to a point where I couldn't sleep without it.
The orthotics worked miracles--as well they should for $450.00. Just one day in these things and the pain in my heels was all but gone.
That was three years ago.
Lately the heel pain has been recurring, and ramping up rapidly. I figured my orthotics were due for replacement, and booked an appointment to find out.
As it turns out, they're in pretty good shape...they just need some refurbishment. That cut the cost about 80%, always a good thing. I was astounded, as I am notoriously hard on anything foot-related--my work shoes--$160.00 Rockports--usually last me nine months or so.
The bad news is that due to some pretty basic laws of physics, if they're busy rebuiding my orthotics, I can't have them. And because they have to wait for a full moon, then bury them at a crossroads and wait for four hundred people to walk over them--or something--I'm without my orthotics for a whole week! Stretching stretch stretchy stretch fuck!
I happened to mention that wearing my Birkenstock sandals felt a whole lot more comfortable than wearing my orthotic-equipped Rockports, lately, only to watch the othopedist's eyes light up like a pinball machine. I was given to understand that my Birks are comfortable for me the same way eating, say, a steady diet of nothing but cheesecake would be "comfortable." Birks, she alleged, were absolutely the worst things I could be putting on my feet.
"So why do they feel so good, then?', I inquired, a little miffed. Birkenstocks are not cheap, and I resented being told I'd thrown a good deal of money away.
"They're molded, for one thing," she said. "But the biggest reason they feel good is because there's no pressure on your swollen heels. HOWEVER," she went on, "the heel to ball ratio on Birks is 1:1. In other words, they're flat. That puts all kinds of pressure in all kinds of places you really don't want pressure. So while they might feel good while they're on, you'll pay a high price once you take them off. It's no coincidence the heel pain came back when you started wearing those things."
She recommended Mephistos, and showed me hers. Sure enough, the heel is higher than the front of the foot. Sure enough, the goddamn things cost half again as much as Birks. Guess I'm going without sandals for the foreseeable future.
She okayed my Rockports, but noted there were more durable shoes out there, and named two brands (Redwing and Prospector) I'd never heard of. While they are more expensive (surprise, surprise!), supposedly they'd last me at least twice as long. Fair enough.
Meanwhile, my heel hurts like a sonovabitch.
Waaaaahhhh.
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