My Right Foot

My foot hurts and so do my feelings.

I’ve had an aching right foot for a year and a half. For several months at the beginning, I ignored the pain, kept playing soccer, kept running, until it got bad enough that I worried I might be causing permanent damage. I wondered, if I ruin this foot, what are my replacement options? Then I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It was a sobering reminder that getting a new foot is not as simple as replacing your windshield wipers, which I also don’t know how to do, but could probably figure out on YouTube. So I stopped playing soccer, stopped running, and my foot ached slightly less, but also I felt sadder, because, endorphins, ya know?

I decided to stop reacting, and start proacting. Off I went to two different podiatrists who gave me three shots of cortisone. Each made me feel good enough to run again until I did, at which point, the ache returned. Then my husband told me podiatrists aren’t even real doctors. Jesus fucking Christ, you couldn’t have shared this ten months ago? Two trips to an orthopedist (i.e. real doctor) and six weeks of physical therapy later and here I am, with a lingering ache I’ve grown so used to, I have to ask myself, does my foot really hurt, or is this just how it feels to be alive? The other day, I asked my five-year-old, “Do you think my foot will ever get better?” He said “I don’t think so. It’s been messed up for too long.” And even though he’s only five and doesn’t know shit about shit, it still hurt my feelings.

Physical therapy is a lot more demanding than the silly little workouts they make you do, like picking up marbles with your toes and trying to balance on one foot with your eyes closed. It means spending at least two hours a week talking to a stranger who seems to have been directed to “talk about ANYTHING, but don’t TALK about anything.” My PT’s office was designed according to the “open office aesthetic” which means I can hear every conversation happening on the floor, and they’re all pretty much the same. A physical therapist in their twenties asks a patient roughly fifteen to fifty years older, “What did you do last weekend?” and “Got any big plans this weekend?” Honestly, it offends me that someone in their twenties would think I think whatever I did on a particular weekend would interest them. Even I don’t want to hear me talk about the Lego-themed birthday party I went to, okay? Couple that with the fact that I’m surrounded by 360 degrees of mirror to stare at my thighs in leggings, and I rarely leave a session without feeling at least a little humiliated.

My physical therapist is a very gentle young man who rarely remembers anything I tell him about myself, but occasionally asserts intimacy by saying things like, “Make sure you get pics of your kids’ Halloween costumes for me!” I can’t say he’s good at his job, because my foot still hurts and according to my orthopedist, nothing he’s making me do is actually targeting the problem. Meanwhile, my orthopedist wants to put my blood through a centrifuge like I’m Lance fucking Armstrong cheating in the Tour de France, which is prohibitively expensive to do and not covered by insurance. I don’t know who to trust. Last week I felt so lonely in the face of how much we are asked to figure out for ourselves, how insufficient an expert’s opinion seems to be, how hard it is to fix what should be fixable. We live in a time where computers can replace me. Can’t they also replace part of me, like my foot, and let me keep the rest?

The one topic of conversation that animates my physical therapist is his family dog, who lives with his mother two hours outside of LA. The dog is sick, which has been weighing heavily on my physical therapist. It’s even got him spending most weekends with his mom to help care for the dog, which seems like an unusually sweet way for a twenty-seven-year-old man to waste his free time. The way he explains it, they’ve been schlepping the dog between a primary care vet and a neurologist, and neither can agree on the source of the dog’s problems, except that it’s something very bad which will probably kill her. He’s frustrated that the two doctors can’t come to a consensus on the dog’s affliction, and believe me, I relate. After all, aren’t I the dog in this situation, schlepping myself between physical therapist and orthopedist, wondering if I should just say, cut it off and give me a wooden peg, the way Lena Dunham had a hysterectomy based on zero medical advice? I want to tell him I understand his frustration and helplessness, but it seems impossible to do without implying he sucks at his job.

The other night I was reading an article to my son out of The Griffith Observer, a magazine distributed by our local observatory. I was doing this because he asked me to, and it seemed like a good way to bore him to sleep. The article was about “stellar magnetism,” which is something about hydrogen fusion inside the sun leading to increased luminosity, leading to thawing ice, leading to a climate where living organisms can exist, and what all that tells us about the possibility of life on Mars. Honestly, I did not understand this article, and that’s the point. It’s incredible how much we know about the universe, which is so big! And space, which is so hard to get to! And how much inside us remains a mystery; our hearts, our minds, our feet. I guess no matter where we’re seeking answers, we want to know we’re not alone. And when we find company, it doesn’t cure us, but it helps.