Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Week of 05/27/2007 - 06/02/2007 (Separated 2nd Metatarsal Joint Week 3)

Three weeks in the land of the mere mortals... and I'm NOT liking it.

For those who watch Grey's, its like when Cristina wanders into the hospital on her wedding day and begs to operate, because she has no eyebrows and no dignity left after getting dolled up by the mother in law: "One cut... I'm a surgeon..." she says pitiously. That's me, see...

One run, one ride, one lap... of anything! I'm an athlete... and I need to FEEL like an athlete... Don't give me the "having the right attitude towards injury" crap--this is a physical suffering, a withdrawal. A material and physiological craving, like the starving person's desire for food... I need to feel the ground move faster and faster beneath me, I need to feel the wind cutting my face, I need to feel the impatient energy run up and down a lean and defined leg, to push with reckless abandon, the lactic acid burning as seconds tick by hard and fast....

In the meantime, there's this:

The $245 shoe...

MBT, Masai Barefoot Technology, was invented by Swiss engineer Karl Müller. During a visit to Korea he made the startling discovery that walking barefoot over paddy fields alleviated his back pain. Back in Switzerland, Müller began to develop a footwear technology that would make the natural instability of soft ground such as Korean paddy fields or the East African savannah accessible also to those, who have to walk on hard surfaces.

Apparently its sort of like the Nike Free concept, except that it supposedly also redistributes the pressure of your weight more evenly across your feet, which is the reason for the decreased joint pain.

I was originally hoping that they would be able to replace the flat surgical shoes that really hurt my feet... but after a few days I determined that the L foot wasn't really healed enough to be able to take the increased range of motion. As a compromise, I'm now wearing one surgical shoe and one MBT shoe. Fortunately, they happen to be about the same height.

Friday 06/01: CORTISONE SHOT. Hot diggity, did not know about all of the ways that this could hurt. First off, the needle is about the size of a dull pencil lead... then, its not like one clean movement, there's a lot of poking around in there to distribute the fluid and find the right place to put it.

Finally, apparently 1 out of 4 people have some sort of horrendous reaction to the cortisone so that they experience excruciating pain for 1-2 days. But, ofcourse, don't freak out, he says. Guess which category yours truly is in...

THIS is my new shoe:

The thing is, given how painful and potentially joint/tendon weakening this shot is, I want to make sure I did all I could to help my foot heal. This is a lot more immobilizing than the flat surgical shoe, so it should help with keeping the pressure off of the joint if it comes out of this shot in good shape.

There was originally novacaine mixed with the cortisone, and as that wore off throughout the day, gradually the pain of the adverse reaction worsened until it reached "excruciating". Iced as much as I could and took 1 Aleve... helped a bit, but still pretty awful.

2 comments:

Katherine said...

Wow, that shoe is intense. I am impressed. Are you wearing the surgical shoe on the left and the MBT on the right, or the other way around? It was my impression that the problem with the surgical shoe was that it was flat and constricting and messed up the other leg. Also, how is the icing-every-five-seconds plan going? Has the swelling gone down?

Katherine said...

Let me get this straight. The point of taking cortisone is so that you can't feel any pain in the area while it heals, right? (And that this cortisone lasts... weeks? Months? I have no idea) But, for some people, the cortisone is excrutiatingly painful for a couple of days?! That makes no sense. Does it still work after the first few days? Does it feel better today?