Flashback - December 15, 2005

My foot! My feet!

Modern problems come with modern times, I guess. There are all sorts of new maladies being discovered and named, and new procedures designed to alleviate them. I'm a case in point.

What a lucky guy I am. (Actually quite lucky, to have good health insurance that will take care of most of this stuff.)

I've been diagnosed with Morton's Neuroma, which is another way of saying "pinched nerve," in my foot. They've got a new hi-tech surgical treatment for it. They snip the transverse intermetatarsal ligament to relieve pressure on the major nerve in your foot. Snip, snip. You only get an "ankle block" for pain so you get to stay awake during the procedure and watch it on TV while it's happening! Talk about reality TV! (I wonder if they'd give me a morphine drip instead?)

Those with flat feet (no arch) are allegedly more prone to this than those with a normal arch. Turns out I have very flat feet. If I'd been drafted to fight in Vietnam back in the '70's when I came of age, I would have been rejected because of my flat feet. And there I was sweating buckets about it at the time. (The year that I became eligible, they abolished the draft, so I missed it by THIS MUCH.)

There are some grisly details, and a surgical video {{cringe}} at this site: http://amsurgical.com/procedures.php?page_label=lower&proc_id=20&ext=lower

I'm set for this "minimally invasive endoscopic" technique for mid-January (2006). I hope it works. It's getting more and more painful to walk or stand in one spot for any length of time. Every now and then, out of the blue, I get these jabs of throbbing, white-hot, searing pain in my foot, which, the doc says, is my nerve being stressed.

Talk about "workin' on my nerve!"