Last night I finally figured out what that occasional pain in my foot is, when I noticed it had sprouted a bump, right at the base of my big toe. Apparently I have a bunion. This is good in that if I have a name I can look up the problem and what’s to be done about it, but rather bad in that apparently what bunions do is to keep getting inevitably worse until eventually surgery is required. A bit scary for someone who is not in a settled place with familiar doctors. And also, the whole idea that my big toe is tilting sideways (which is what a bunion is) is a bit weird.
In other minor annoyances, we came back from our trip to find no phone service in our flat. Rudder’s got a company cell-phone, I have one I sort of hate to use because it’s prepaid and a bit of a pain to get more minutes, and we have Skype, so it’s not a tragedy, but it does make it more difficult to arrange things. And things have been needing to be arranged; when Mom sent the copy of her passport and Dad’s driver’s license to help with getting my birth certificate ‘legalized’, it got returned for a slightly wrong address, and we’re supposed to take the cat to his new home tonight, so we need to figure out how to get there. (The guy left a message on Rudder’s cell, but his number didn’t show up as listed.)
Minor pinpricks, but annoying.
For at least twenty years doctors have been asking if my bunions bother me. No, they don’t! I have other foot issues, but no painful bunions. And you will probably have less difficulty than I, because I used to wear very high heels.
I’ve had bunions since wearing high heels (and doing toe dancing) in my youth, and had one (left) operated on in the 1980s. They have much better techniques for doing bunionectomy now-a-days, I hear. I should get the other side done but the last one took so long to heal up and I was in a cast for 6 weeks. I had it repaired (they cut open my foot, cut away the excess bone, and stitched me up, leaving a metal rod going from my toe down into the top of my foot) in March and I couldn’t run normally on it until after September. But I hear they do much less invasive measures for bunions these days.