Breaking the habit of a lifetime.

Ok so it's nearly Christmas, and that's maybe not the best time to be having an operation, especially on my left foot when the other one isn't all that pain free, but when I was offered two dates one before Christmas and one in January, and after nonchalantly trying to take the "after all the festivities" approach for five minutes I just realised there was no point waiting.  I just couldn't use that foot anymore, because it just wouldn't work.  So I've finally (I hope) been and got it done.  Under the plaster, the middle three bones have been sawn through in two places, shortened by about 4mm and now have titanium plates on.


It's really weird because I've had so many operations on my right foot, but none on my left foot since the original Wilson's osteotomy when I was 14, which basically left me walking on half a fore-foot (and being proportionally twice as heavy). So the crutches thing feels weird and I nearly put the funny shoe on my right foot, and I'm supposed to keep the foot elevated with my big cushion but I put that on the right as well, out of habit.

Yes it's a funny thing in a way to think of having foot operations as a habit.  Some habit.  But it just seems my life has worked out this way and that's all there is to it.

So the hospital was usual, that same crazy place, both orderly and chaotic, and I met some wonderful women, including a woman of 89 having a knee replacement, and another woman in her sixties who had both shoulders replaced in her thirties and is now having secondary hip replacement and living in both acute and chronic pain every day and who was delightful.

We were all freaked out, the whole family, for the last week or so but I'm grateful the opportunity came up fast and was done fast.  I was actually feeling nauseous with fear last week, and there is something quite profound for me about finally re-approaching and trying to correct a mistake that was made when I was a child.

As I talked about in this earlier post, Wilson's osteotomy isn't really done any more because of, well, me and all the other poor sods who've had to put up with it.  Same, largely with the Weil osteotomy.  I'm not a believer in the medical model of disability, and don't subscribe to "fix him/her with surgery" deflections.  But my problem was caused surgically, and surgery was the only way to even try and correct it. The trouble was, there wasn't anything better for such a long time.

Thank goodness someone finally realised that shortening metatarsals without screwing up the joints was the way to go.  That way maybe there'll be a few less "lazy scroungers" in the future. ;)

Now it's just a tantalising waiting game to see whether it's really the habit that's been broken or just the foot.