Veering Off Course

            For the last four weeks, I have been posting “Chris’s Crash Course on Coming to the Clinic: how to be the perfect patient” every Wednesday. I know all the subjects I need to cover yet, but since the first of the week, have been thinking of veering off course.

If you don’t know me personally and don’t remember reading this blog post from a while back, you probably don’t know about the trouble I’ve been having with my Achilles tendon. And like I told the podiatrist who I saw yesterday, I didn’t just wake up with this the other morning. This has been troubling me for five years. Yes, five years. Can you say “stubborn, bull-headed kraut”?

Anyway, to make a long story short, shortly after someone challenged me to run in the 5K on the Fourth of July in 2013, and I started running, my left Achilles heel has been aching. I bought better shoes and some orthotics to put in them. It settled down a little bit and I powered through. The next year, when I started running again in earnest in the spring (coz I just cannot get into it on the treadmill), that tendon started up again. I started taking ibuprofen and got some exercises to stretch it out.

Then in June of 2015, my hip went out as well. I finally gave up the whole running thing. The hip didn’t get better until I finally started going to the chiropractor in the fall, but the heel just kept right on hurting.

Sometime after that I broke down and saw an orthopedic surgeon. He took x-rays of both ankles, showing me bone spurs on not just the left heel, but the other one as well. He didn’t offer me a lot of hope, no quick fixes, just ibuprofen, ice, and rest, and in fact he said he was surprised I didn’t have pain in both of heels. I told him that was not a helpful thing to say.

Here it is coming up on Spring again and for some bizarre reason, I want to get out and start running the roads again. Or even, for not a bizarre reason, but just because, I thought I would start walking all the roads of my town again, a quest I had started four years ago. But I finally had to admit that something had to give with that left ankle. Not only was the ache becoming more of a constant pain, it was warm and swollen at the end of each day.

I saw the podiatrist Monday morning. She put me in this wonderful boot, recommended icing it, told me to avoid strenuous exercise on it, and scheduled me for an MRI.  I go back to see her in two weeks to get the results of the MRI, see if this boot is helping at all, and come up with a game plan moving forward.

And the whole time, I’m just thinking that I want to be the perfect patient. I want this heel pain to go away not just for my sake but for the sake of the medical professionals who are trying to help me. Such is the curse of working in health care. I’ll keep you posted.

And off to work I go.