yes, it is broken

Aug 16, 2013

I don’t think I have adequately announced it to the world…it got lost in everything else…

MY FOOT IS BROKEN

I fell off a barstool back on July 3rd and wondered for the next three weeks if it was broken or not. I finally went in to my favorite foot doctor the day before my scheduled departure for the mountains and he found the break in the 4th metatarsal. I had already been wearing a walking boot for about a week at that point and had been wrapping it up in vet wrap for the two weeks prior, but it wasn’t getting better. If anything, the pain was getting worse by the day. We still aren’t really sure what is wrong because it should be getting better by now and it is not. It is quite possible I have a torn ligament in my foot which is only discoverable with an MRI. Even if I don’t have a torn ligament, it is pretty much a given that my ligaments aren’t doing their job to hold the broken bone together while it heals and thus healing is going to take a lot longer than normal. I have been told (but I am trying so hard to let the fear around this go) that it very well may not heal at all because of the ligament laxity and I will have to have foot surgery and pins inserted to hold the bone together. None of this will be figured our for weeks and weeks more. It is all so discouraging.

My hip doctor was quite nervous about me being in a boot and stressed to me that it is absolutely essential for my hip sockets to be level within 1/16 of an inch or the pubic symphysis will break, the labral tear will flare up again, and my femoral nerve will start short-circuiting my nervous system on a regular basis. Thus started a seven hour search for a shoe that was within 1/16 of an inch of my walking boot height. It was not pretty. I ranted and raved to Kat about it, then got to work going to a gazillion stores and asking shoe fitters to please lie down on the floor and measure the difference between my two feet with teensy-tiny rulers. After about five hours of this and having NO SUCCESS AT ALL, I completely fell apart and bawled my eyes out and called Kat and asked her to rescue me. I hadn’t eaten in all this time and I thought if I had some nourishment maybe some of my brain cells and hopefully some of my determination would return to me. Kat came and whisked me away for some food with her and her children, then she surprised me by taking me in her van to more shoe stores. She said I was unfit to be left alone in my ready-to-give-up-and-melt-into-a-puddle condition. Armed with her confidence and ingenuity we started searching again. By the time we found a shoe that would work we had five salespeople and Kat on the floor measuring, constructing paper devices to accurately solve the how-tall-is-the-walking-boot problem, and me past the point of being able to speak or make decisions at all. Thank goodness for super-hero Kat…I could not have made it through the day without her.

The next day we set off on our trip a day late and many dollars short, but I had my boot, I had my shoe, I had a big stack of books to read, and promises made to stay off my foot as much as humanly possible.

I did stay off my foot very well and it was doing great while I was up there. Since I have been home it has been another story. There is so much to do in running a home and I am up on it much more here than I was while camping. My goal is to stay off it as much as I can for the next three weeks and cover it with oils, BF&C, take my supplements to regrow bone, and pray hard for healing.

If it isn’t significantly better in three weeks I don’t know what to do. iFamily starts. Gym starts. Homeschool starts. I am needed.