The Plantar Strikes Back

I spent the next 24 hours in pain.

It was not mild pain, but it was not usually extreme, either. It varied between vague aching and sharp twinges that made me gasp or groan. I could not by any means put any weight on my left heel, so I limped around my kitchen making dinner and doing dishes for a good part of the day until the pain became obnoxious enough that I thought "this stinks. I'm going to sit down." And oh yeah, maybe take some Tylenol.

And the Tylenol helped. When I remembered to take it. And putting my foot up helped.

It's one of those occasions where you realize just how dependent you are on your feet and how much one part of the foot relies upon the other parts to function correctly. I could comfortably stand at the sink with some weight on the ball of my left foot, but if I needed to shift the weight or move the foot completely, the flexing of my leg and foot muscles shot severe pain through that tender, angry heel.

I complained a fair bit. I told my mother. We told each other that this was a sign that the treatment was working. We hoped, but had no way of knowing.

I went to bed that night with only moderate discomfort. Tylenol, as I said. I slept well until 5am or so when I awoke and tossed about fitfully. It was a few minutes before I realized the reason I was awake and the reason I couldn't get back to sleep--my foot hurt.

I got up by seven and thought I would go about my day as normal. I got dressed for my Jazzercise class. My foot hurt, though. I wasn't sure I could do it. I put my exercise shoes on. OUCH. No. I couldn't go and jump around on this heel. Don't ask me to write about how it felt to take that shoe off again. I'll shudder if I have to remember that moment of agony.

My mother called and asked me how I was. I told her I was hurting. She told me I had to call Dr. Pop's office and ask them if this was normal.

Ugh. In my experience, if you ever call a doctor's office to say, "this is what's going on. is that normal?" the person who is there to advise you always says "you'd better come in." No matter what. Then when you get there, the person who sees you treats you like "uh, you came in for this? what kind of weenie are you?" And you want to make it clear to them somehow that it wasn't your idea, you didn't want to come in, but there's no real way to get them to hear you.

Sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And by about the time the physician's assistant was looking at it and telling me it looked fine (which I knew), the pain was fading and I was feeling pretty good again.

So yeah, 24 hours of Tylenol-manageable pain. Nothing pleasant about those 24 hours, but they were manageable. And I would only have to wait a month to find out if it was worth it. But that day, I was wishing that someone had warned me about the whole pain thing, beyond a passing "it's gonna hurt in an hour."

And I was hoping that one round of injections would be enough to kill this thing forever.

You don't always get what you hope for.