I didn't really think about my feet very much prior to November 2013. Sure, they had done a good job of carrying me across continents, mountains and dance floors but they were also annoyingly wide and difficult to shoe.
Besides, there were other parts of my body that demanded the lion's share of attention, like the hip afflicted with severe osteoarthritis and the knee joint that has so thoroughly pulverised it's meniscus I can both feel and hear the bones grinding against each other whenever I take a step. I had grown used to living with chronic (often debilitating) pain for almost fifteen years and in the back of my mind I knew I would need to have both joints replaced some time in the future.
In the early hours of Monday 18th November 2013 my left foot made it's bold play, dragging me into a world of white hot pain and long-term limited mobility.
It had been a lovely family-oriented weekend. My son and daughter were with me (they have two homes and spend 50% of their time at the home they share with me) and we spent time with my father and two of my brothers and their families, celebrating my son's 16th birthday. Underlying the celebratory good cheer was a deep concern about my father's increasingly apparent mental decline, due to dementia.
Dad and I jointly purchased a new bed for my son, a combined birthday and Christmas gift for the young man who had well and truly outgrown his narrow single bed. We completely emptied and cleaned his bedroom and my son and daughter assembled the new double bed. By Sunday night, the contents of his room were either gathered near the front door ready for collection by a charity or packed away again in his room - or so I thought.
On a middle of the night dunny run, with neither my eyes open nor the lights on, one of my feet connected with a box of action figure toys out of its usual place. I don't recall if I kicked the box or stood in it, but whatever I did caused a spectacular fall that resulted in my body slamming against a wall and my foot bending like a banana. While reaching out with my hands to break my fall I managed to pull a heavy electric keyboard onto my thighs and a basket of percussive instruments onto my head. Cowbells, rhythm sticks and maracas created a brief cacophony as they rained down on me. My brain did a quick assessment of my injuries - sore head, sore thighs, my foot. MY FOOT!
My long, loud howl of pain roused my thirteen year old daughter. In her levelheaded way she calmly lifted me from the floor and supported me as I hopped back to bed. She helped me into bed and gently rested my foot on a pile of pillows before heading to the kitchen for an ice pack. What a trooper! Did I mention she was only thirteen at the time this happened? #likeagirl
The pain was excruciating but I tried valiantly to give my daughter a reassuring smile as I sent her back to bed. It was just after 3am and she needed to get up at 6am to get ready for school. She returned to her room, but I discovered later that she didn't sleep again that night, so great was her worry about me.
I didn't sleep again either.
For the next three hours I quietly sobbed while my foot swelled and throbbed. I set my mind to the problem of how the hell I was going to get the kids to the train station and myself to hospital. I went over and over the plan I had nutted out - lie here until 6:30 am, call cab and call brother, drop kids at station and pick up brother, go to hospital.
As the hours passed I added another item to the list - lie here until 6:30am, hop to the bathroom, call cab and brother, etc. My tumble had derailed me from the purpose of getting up in the first place and my bladder was uncomfortably full.
At 6am my daughter returned to my room to check on me, and when the tousled head of my son appeared in the doorway and he asked "what happened?" his weary mother and sister snarled in unison "how on earth did you sleep through all the ruckus?" Poor fella. He dropped to his knees by my bedside and hugged me tightly. Eager to help, he kept asking what he could do for me. I laid out the plan for them and my son helped me get off the bed, then supported me while I hopped to the bathroom. Every hop jolted my left foot, giving new life to pain. I gritted my teeth and sank gratefully onto the toilet seat.
I couldn't bear to jolt my foot any more, so I crawled on hands and knees back to the bedroom, grabbed whatever clothes were within reach and after levering myself onto my right foot, I threw the clothes and myself onto the bed. I dressed myself lying down and waited for the kids to finish dressing, having breakfast, making lunch and packing bags. The pain was so overwhelming I was having trouble talking, so I booked a cab via an app and sent a text to my brother telling him to be in his driveway and ready to jump in a cab.
When the cab arrived I crawled out to the driveway and, using my elbows on the taxi seat and with a helping hand from the taxi driver I levered myself up on to my right foot so I could get onto the seat. The driver was very kind about my predicament.
As I looked at the worried faces of my children when I left them at the train station, I wondered if I would see them again that night, or if I would be spending the night in hospital.
I was relieved to find my brother waiting in the driveway at Dad's house as instructed. He was Dad's primary carer and there was every chance he wouldn't have been able to get away. Thankfully, Dad was still asleep when I arrived. Knowing that the Royal District Nursing Service would be along soon to supervise his morning insulin injection and make sure he ate breakfast, and also knowing Dad's habit of wandering off from home in search of his "other home" usually occurred in the afternoons or evenings, we felt we could take the risk of leaving him alone for a little while. All I needed Shane to do was get me into a wheelchair. Once he had wheeled me into the emergency department I told him he should head back to Dad, but he stayed with me and asked his partner to keep an eye on Dad. #dementiaadventure
At the triage desk I graded my pain as 10/10 and gratefully swallowed the morphine tablet handed to me by the nurse. After 20 minutes, when the morphine had merely taken the edge off the pain, I figured I had sustained a fairly serious injury. Although still in pain, my mood improved dramatically and I was able to smile and joke around. That's morphine for you!
I was wheeled into the x-ray department and the pain reared its head again when the radiographer insisted I bear weight on my foot. I waited in the short-term emergency ward trying to calmly breathe my pain out (some hippy pain management technique I had used successfully during labour and childbirth) and chatting with my brother. I sent an email to my boss and my staff, letting them know I probably wouldn't be coming into the office.
A doctor arrived at my bedside to let me know the x-ray did not show any breaks or fractures, so they were sending me home. A woman arrived with a pair of crutches and an equipment hire form, so I could pay the $30 hire cost before leaving the hospital. I was discharged without a prescription for pain relief medication and was advised to take paracetamol to help with the pain.
I spent the remainder of that week on the couch with my foot elevated, using my phone and iPad to work from home.
The following week I hobbled into the office for a day-long management meeting and spent the rest of that week working from my couch. When there was no significant improvement by the start of the third week, I went to my local general practice and asked for another x-Ray. Again, the x-ray didn't show any bone damage and the GP said that I should continue to rest it as much as possible, and it should be back to normal within a couple of weeks.
I felt frustrated with this advice and wanted to look into it more thoroughly, but there was so much intense, serious stuff going on in my life right then that I let go of the idea of healing and settled for carrying on and coping with a bung foot.
For the next seven months I hobbled around on my painful, misshapen foot while life went on. I hobbled to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal for the hearing to be appointed my father's guardian and administrator. I limped through tours of aged care facilities in the north and north east of Melbourne. I clomped around Dad's house, helping my brother's pack up his belongings after I moved him into a nursing home. I shuffled through airports in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide and dragged my foot along those cities' streets and throughout the north island of New Zealand. All the while, biting back the pain and discomfort. I almost managed to stand through an entire Polyphonic Spree concert, but I just couldn't make it through the eight song encore set and trudged outside the venue looking for a seat.
Stupidly, this injury also co-incided with my sudden and surprising obsession with tropical fish-keeping - an interest that involves lugging around heavy buckets of water and other heavy things like tanks and gravel. #tanktales
There wasn't much time to elevate my foot over those months as the demands of the campaigning work I was doing in my regular job, coupled with the work I was doing out of work hours on our internal election, saw me working fourteen hour days and working seven days a week. I can't be sure of this but I think my stress and fatigue left me in a fog so thick that the pain couldn't pierce it. I just kept stumbling on, knowing the end of this intense period would surely come.
Then two things happened in July 2014. We lost the internal election, throwing my job security into question, and the twelve month waiting period for the private hospital cover I had organised on the advice of a health insurance consultant I had met at a pub in mid-2013, expired.
I pushed my job security fears to one side and made an appointment with the sports medicine doctor who had diagnosed my knee issues a year or so ago. I told him I wanted to organise hip replacement surgery as soon as possible now I was eligible for private hospital cover. He had watched me closely as I walked into his office and he said we could talk about the hip but it seemed my foot was the obvious priority.
The MRI he ordered showed the ligament that normally holds the foot bones in their place was, in my foot, a "ball of grey mush". Arrows on the scan pointed to spots of arthritis and possible fracturing. The doctor referred me to two surgeons for urgent assessment and asked me to let him know which one I decided to go with.
The first surgeon I saw sent me off for a CT and CT-spect scan. The process for these scans takes a day and when I next saw the surgeon he was able to show me an in depth look at the damage to my foot. The ligament was beyond repair and there were little fractures and small loose splinters of bone.
In the fall all those months ago I had sustained a lisfranc (mid-foot) injury along with the ligament damage, and the only course of action available was a surgical procedure called a mid-foot fusion.
I was relieved to finally have an understanding of the injury and to learn there was, if not a cure, a procedure that could give me some relief.
Between the diagnosis and the surgery (about 7 weeks) I got through by having the foot strapped by a podiatrist (surprisingly effective) for four days per week, then wearing a soft ankle brace on the other three days.
On 5th November 2014 - almost a year after I fell - I was wheeled into surgery.
To be continued.
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