De-feeted

I realise I haven’t mentioned ailments lately, and they were the main cause of starting this blog. In fact, I’ve had a good run for my money, apart from the insomnia which is still plaguing me. If only I could sell the house and move out of the boyfriend’s and have my own things around me again, I think I’d start to relax.

Today, though, the foot problems kicked off again. (Yes, I know, awful pun.) I am a Piscean. Every star sign has part of the body allotted to it as an area they should take particular care of, and for Pisceans, it is the feet. Apart from getting a stiletto heel through my right one at a school dance (an accident, not a stomp from a jealous girl who saw me dancing with her boyfriend – I was the bespectacled wallflower whom nobody asked to dance!), my feet and I had a trouble-free relationship even in the barefoot Sixties when my soles were so tough that I could walk over gravel without wincing.

In 1993, I was coming out of a changing room in a charity shop when my left foot was almost sliced in twain by the corner of a knife-sharp piece of stair-edging. Gushing blood, I hobbled up the stairs to the till and asked the young, dopy girl assistant for help. She blanched and waved me up the road to the chemists. Leaving bloody, CSI-style behind me all the way, I reached the chemists where Mr Mistry produced a wodge of cotton wool and some sticky tape and told me it needed stitching. ‘Too jagged for stitches,’ said the hospital, after my tetanus jab. They butterfly-clipped it and it gradually healed, but left a weak spot that hurt when I touched it, and a long white scar.

“Give me the address and I’ll sue them for you,” my solicitor said. This was the same lawyer who had won me six grand following my whiplash injury. It was three weeks before I was well enough to walk down to the shop, only to find it had packed up and vanished, probably aware of my impending lawsuit.

Fast forward five years. I’d had a hysterectomy that had left me feeling as if a bayonet was stuck in my stomach. It was three months before I was capable of walking the mile to the doctor’s. I didn’t realise that feet are held together by muscle and tendon and ligament and that these can go slack through lack of use. I set off at my usual stride and wham! A terrible agony shot through my left foot and I couldn’t walk. Somehow, I managed to hobble painfully home. It took half an hour. I transferred most of my weight to my right foot and three weeks later that suffered the same fate. I was now saddled with a condition called metatarsalgia. No more high heels for me. Instead, a lifetime of sensible shoes with squidgy insoles.

Last night, I danced barefoot for an hour and a half to the Who’s Glastonbury concert on TV. Wow, my feet are getting better, I thought happily. I have a party to go to next week and had bought some shoes with small heels, hoping I could wear them. Well, fate had the last laugh (yes, you can hear my old cry of "It’s not fair!”), for this morning I stubbed the middle toe of my left foot so badly on the leg of the bed that a sickening pain shot right through my foot – and now I can hardly walk again. Bye-bye high heels, it will have to be sequinned flip-flops now.

Footnote: I am rubbing arnica gel all over my foot three times a day. Here’s hop(p)ing…