Podiatric Panic

My new doctor sits there staring as I wipe my eyes with the heels of my palms. I apologize for being so emotional. He's here to look at my foot but at the moment I'm more concerned about my knee, which has turned red and swollen overnight, obviously infected. I'm having flashbacks of the first infection I ever had, which was in this same knee over two decades ago. Back then, I didn't understand anything about infection, and didn't have health insurance, so I put off having it looked at until I finally ended up in the ER, feverish and incoherent. For the first and only time in my life I experienced hallucinations, an army of demonic faces pressing out of the drab green wallpaper. I'm not hallucinating now, in fact I feel fine, aside from the fact that I can't breathe and my pulse is racing and I feel like I'm going to scream because I'm certain they're going to want to keep me overnight and cut me open and

But the doctor doesn't seem overly concerned, just says he'll call in a prescription for antibiotics. He takes x-rays of my foot. It's amazing how much this technology has changed since my first infection. No more lying still on a table with a lead blanket covering you as the technician operates the camera from the other room; no more waiting for film to develop. Instead he leads me to what looks like a flatbed scanner and has me stand on it as he takes the pictures, which are ready instantly. The last two doctors had done the same, found them inconclusive. They'd spent months trying to figure out why my foot was not healing up, acting baffled the whole time, but he takes one look at them and immediately concludes that it's the same issue I've had with the other part of my foot, and that he'd like to schedule surgery for a few weeks from now.

When you lose your toes, as I have on my left foot, the ends of the metatarsals don't stop growing. Knobs of bone form on the ends, and in time these knobs press through the meager padding on the bottom of the foot, causing sores which won't heal up because of the pressure placed on them by walking. So what a doctor will do is essentially sand down the bone. I've had this procedure done on the right side of my foot three times now -it seems to need to be done every five years or so, which is a pain, but is much better than losing the entire thing, which I'm told will almost inevitably happen at some point. I'm not sure why it's never been an issue on the left side before, no doubt something to do with the way I walk on the weird trapezoidal remains of my foot. The doctor says that at some point he might want to cut and adjust my Achilles tendon, but for the time being he seems confident that a light shaving will suffice to allow me to walk again, and I very much want to believe him.

The following morning I receive an email from his office saying my surgery has been scheduled for a week from now. I'm surprised but happy to be getting it over with so quickly. The idea that I might be ambulatory by the new year is, in theory, thrilling. But hope leaves you vulnerable to disappointment. Adversity has not made me strong, but brittle, and I fear that the next disappointment may be the one to finally make me shatter.