Ow
The one downside of my interview suit is that the shoes are phenomenally uncomfortable. They are a pair of stiff leather Churches and the right hand shoe has developed a crease which means that with every step my big toe has a fold of hard leather rammed into it. Normally it’s uncomfortable for a day or two, but gets better. This time the pain seemed to get worse… but not every day.
Worried I may have done something bad to my foot I went to see the nurse at the doctors surgery who first suggested hairline fracture, but then went on to conclude it was tendinitis once I’d pointed out the pain was not everywhere she thought it was. The advice was to rest the foot and it should get better over a couple of weeks. And get better it did, slowly, although on days where I walked further it hurt a bit more.
Last night, however, it was worse than it had ever been, to the point where I was awake for several hours despite copious amounts of fairly potent pain killers. Noting that this was my last weekday before I became gainfully employed, and therefore the last day I could easily do anything about it, I toddled off to the local minor injuries unit. My thinking was that since they had an x-ray there if it needed to be x-rayed it wouldn’t take too long.
The bod there poked and prodded, asked questions, poked some more and then decided that he was fairly sure it wasn’t a stress fracture given I was too fit and healthy and I’d not put undue stress on it, just worn some bloody uncomfortable shoes. He then went on to explain how there was an outside chance that it could be gout, a minuscule chance it could be arthritis related, and a possibility that it could be related to my kidneys being inflamed and not filtering uric acid properly. He went on to tell me that while an x-ray would rule out (or confirm) a stress fracture the chances of it being that were too low to really warrant doing one so he probably wouldn’t and, on reflection, it’s probably best if I did gentle exercise, elevated the leg when resting, applied ice if needed and avoided anything like Deep Heat…
At this point I needed to interject to find out just exactly why one would avoid Deep Heat. Apparently, I was told, it is entirely the wrong thing for an inflammation injury such as this and would simply make it worse. It was at this point I realised what had happened. The day before doing to the doctors, and yesterday, I’d gone to bed with the foot being sore, so I’d applied Deep Heat thinking it would help. Last night I applied masses of the stuff. Instead of making it better I’d just made things worse, it was just tendinitis and perhaps, if I laid off the Deep Heat, it would get better by itself. Whoops :S