Tag Archives: surgery

Oof. Been a while since my last post. This is partly due to me doing my very best ostrich impression; pretending the days weren’t going past so quickly and that the 15th wasn’t coming up. The reason being that I was booked in for surgery on my foot on the 15th and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, so I avoided my laptop and anything with a date on with a vengeance. The upside to that and my borderline OCD behaviour of the last couple of weeks is that my bedroom hasn’t looked so clean and tidy since I moved in; in fact I don’t think it looked this tidy even when I did move in. My filing is mostly done, the kitchen is spotless, the hallway looks fantastic, my houseplants are pruned, re-potted and healthier, the garden is well-groomed, and I have the paperwork ready for my tax return. Good things all. On the downside, I have much computer-based stuff to catch up on and now I have plenty of opportunity – my left foot is now “non weight bearing” for about two weeks, so in the absence of someone whisking me away for an accessible holiday to the south of France, catching up with emails and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my new season 6 DVD boxset will be all the entertainment I get for a little while.

What happened to my foot, then? Those who know me will no doubt have noticed the blue walking stick (or blue with stars on if it’s a special occasion or I’m in an outgoing mood) that I get about with, some have even been brave enough to ask about it. Contrary to the flippant answers I have sometimes given, I have not been attacked by a shark, crocodile, vicious ants or any other innocent creature; nor did I break it doing a bungee jump or falling off a zipwire.

It’s all Mum’s fault. Not intentionally of course, since that would be a matter for the courts, but genetically. She has natural bunions, which I inherited. Yes, that can happen. Bunions. I hate that word. Even the word is ugly. And the medical terminology isn’t much better – Hallux Valgus. Ugh. Mum got off lightly, but as the lucky recipient, mine are worse. Special soles solved Mum’s issues, and I do have a special pair of shoes with special soles, but that just means I can walk with minor discomfort; trying to walk in shoes with normal soles for more than twenty minutes is agonising. That’s assuming I can find normal shoes to fit; another quirk of my feet is that they’re size 5. Which means either I get to wear teenage shoes or women’s shoes. So that means either pink, glittery trainers for the girls, or overdone sporty things for the boys, or shoes made by people who really believe that all women have thin, perfectly formed feet. I gave up shoe shopping as a futile exercise a long time ago, and I dread the day my special shoes fall apart.

Indeed, I have often felt it rather unfair (and some of my friends will recognise this refrain) that some women have to torture themselves for years, squeezing their feet into badly-fitting high heels over a long period of time to get the kind of bunions I was born with, when I can count the number of times I’ve worn high heels in my life on one hand. I concede that no-one ever said life was fair, but this is really unfair. Really, really unfair. I don’t even like high heels. This is why I have so little sympathy for those who have self-inflicted bunions – you chose to wear painful, badly-fitting shoes, so suck it up, bitch. If you don’t want bunions, don’t twist your feet into some creations some mad shoe designer with no concept of real measurements has come up with.

They already tried to fix them once before; three years ago I had an osteotomy (basically they break your toe, reset it into a more ideal position, and put in a pin to hold it in place) and I found myself in the position of being the youngest on the ward by about thirty years. Apparently it’s very unusual to have bunions at my age. Lucky me.

It didn’t work. This first inkling I had that it might not work was when one of the surgeons, on the day of the surgery, said “by the way, as it’s genetic, there may be some drifting” and wandered off. “Some drifting” my arse. More like my foot completely rejected the operation, so my toe slowly went back to its original position, fighting the pin every millimetre of the way. Instead of a six week recovery, it took three months, at the end of which my foot looked like the op never happened – apart from the scars and a dynesthesia (off-kilter sensation due to minor nerve damage) that means I could now only wear fluffy socks; anything else itches like hellfire. “Some drifting”. Hah!

So this is the second attempt, they’ve tried it a different way, basically they’ve broken it (again), reset it, removed the pin, put in a screw, and shaved a little bit off the bone at the side to neaten it up a a bit. They let me have a look at the ‘after’ x-ray and it does look more like an ordinary foot – apart from the bright white screw, the bright white staple in my toe (to be removed along with my stitches in two weeks’ time, that’ll be fun) and the noticeable small hole where the pin used to be. It’s a freaky x-ray, now I think about it.

And my foot is now in a very well-wrapped bandage, my big toe held firmly in place, and I’m under strict instructions to keep it elevated, not to put weight on it, not to get it wet, and “nobody but us touches this foot. If you have a problem, call us. Nobody else touches this but us or the plaster room. Not your GP, not your GP’s nurse, not A & E. If it bleeds, throbs, or any other problems, CALL US. Nobody but us. OK?”

I got the feeling that a certain amount of work has been put into it, and they don’t want anybody messing it up. I actually almost felt quite flattered, except I was still coming down off the local anaesthetic. And the general. They gave me both. It’s fair to say I spent most of yesterday unconscious, asleep or stoned. Bless them. And the post-op painkillers are good too. Before anyone judges me for the number of pills I’m currently taking, I challenge them to have a weight-bearing limb broken for the second time in three years and not turn into a pill-popping junkie.

Here’s hoping it works! If it does, they’ll do the other foot next year and then I’ll hopefully be hoofing about happily for the next twenty years or so. I’ll never do riverdance, but I’ll settle for general mobility. Fingers – or should that be toes? – crossed!