Picture Perfect

That's how my podiatrist assessed my progress today after performing bilateral neuroma foot surgery on me almost two weeks ago. "Picture perfect." Hardly any swelling at all. Excellent. A little bruising in the toes, totally expected. Outstanding.

He pulled out the sutures today, and it hardly hurt at all. I was more paralyzed by the expectation of pain of removing the stitches. Last year, with my first surgery, one of my most vivid memories of the whole experience is when he removed the sutures. It hurt like a sonofabitch. Every one of them. Looking back, I think the guy was a freakin' sadist.

This time, like that time, there were five stitches per foot, and I tensed up bigtime as he began to pull them out.

"You're looking a little pekid there," he says, looking up at me after removing the first three, and I had hardly felt any more than a little pressure. I asked for the numbing spray anyway on the others because they were closer to the toes and relaxed a bit. So he sprays me with something that was cold, cold, cold, and it, in fact, hurt my foot worse than pulling the stitches out with no spray.

"Careful what you ask for," he snickers. Are they all sadists??

Actually, this guy was quite good.

The pathology report confirmed that I did indeed have a non-malignant neuroma in each foot. Good to know for sure that it wasn't some bizarre, never-seen-before lump of unidentifyable material or anything wierd like that. Each was the size of a quarter, all around, up and down. Imagine a marble with a diameter of a quarter. (A quarter is a twenty-five cent coin, for the foreign readers).

The feet feel so much better already. Before the surgery, they felt "thick," which was most likely the built-up scar tissue, and of course the neuroma itself. While I still have a lot of numbness in my feet after surgery, they already feel "thinner," intuitively.

Also, in the months leading up to this second surgery, I had been getting a lot of foot spasms. Just put my foot in a certain position and it would begin to spasm. Now, two weeks after surgery, I assume that same position and no spasm. Not one spasm since surgery.

One thing I have learned about my foot, as if I didn't know already, is that I have a very thin foot. The metatarsals are very close together, and so the nerve can get easily inflamed.

Another thing I've learned through this ordeal is that I have very flat feet. So flat, in fact, that I would never have been accepted into the military. Well, let's say that, back in 1973, when I became eligible for the draft, I would not have been accepted. Today's military will take practically anyone, even with a criminal record. But that's another post. If I HAD been drafted back then, I would have been kicked out. Little did I know. We were sweating it BAD back then.