Up and down and up and down and up

[muckefuck]

What a week! I've mentioned before that I'm bad about blogging about good times, since they tend to exhaust me. Well, another factor is that sometimes good times have other unexpectedly bad consequences and that curdles any desire I have to talk about them. A good example was my wildly successful cocktail party last August, which triggered a meltdown in my overheated relations with Tuppers. I couldn't think of the party without thinking about how angry he was with me and that pretty much killed any desire I had to talk about it.

So it was with last Saturday and the birthday party I attended in Albany Park. The man of the hour was a bar buddy named Blue Eyes (who some of you may remember from my account of a disastrous outing some years back). He's always been more than decent to me when we run into each other, so I was happy to splurge on a fat bottle of cachaça with which to toast him. And the party was a roaring success, with an interesting mix of people. At least half were Spanish-speakers, so my conversational skills got a workout--not to mention my dancing skills.

And that's where it all went sour. I'd been on and off the floor all night, at one point learning the bachata from a very sexy young thing. (Too slim for my taste, but I appreciate the attention all the same.) Then well into the time when I'd begun sobering up in preparation for the trek back home, I did something to my foot. Every part of the experience was so horribly reminiscent of that moment last September in a bar now closed, that I was completely convinced I'd broken it again. I wanted to cry; I wanted to put my fist through a wall; I wanted to know why the Fates had it in for me.

What I did, however, was very hastily say my goodbyes and pack myself into a cab. I hardly slept that night for worry and counted the hours until I could see my podiatrist again. I'm embarrassed to remember some of the things I thought and said during the next day-and-a-half. Monday I lay in bed wishing the day over before it began. By the end of it, though, I felt like the protagonist in Oe's A personal affair, my crushing dilemma safely ex machina'ed away.

Make no mistake--it's awesome to have a bruised nerve instead of a fracture. But it's dismaying to learn that I can't tell the two apart. When I actually broke my foot, I was convinced it would heal up on its own in a few days--which is exactly what it's doing now, after I went and convinced myself it was another break. Maddening! It seems the older I get, the less attuned I am to my own body.

Case in point: I was a little sniffly Tuesday night and took some zinc. At about five-thirty or so, I woke up feeling absolutely miserable and told monshu (and everyone) that the horrible death cold I had this time last year was back again. Perhaps it was but I got the jump on it with the zinc? Because here I am back at work already feeling only as bad as I would after a semi-sleepless night.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear that it's not a break! I hope the foot pain and the cold are both completely gone soon.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure I'll soon find something to take their place!

...

[dorisduke.livejournal.com]

If each pain mimics one another, why would expect to be able to tell the difference. It is always to be safe when it comes to pain; it is after all an indicator that something is wrong. It is smart to have it checked.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, apparently people frequently mistake Jones fractures for sprains, as I did. But this was much further up in the foot and I could curl my toes, so I should've known it was all soft tissue. I guess it will take a couple more injuries to reach that level of expertise.

[grunter.livejournal.com]

You were in Albany Park and didn't visit?

*pouts*

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I wasn't invited!

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Pain is often not very informative, and its instructions are so loud that it makes it hard to think straight.

I've had back trouble for decades. A couple of years ago I started to feel what I thought was muscle or tendon pain in one shin and foot. I thought it was a consequence of my walking strangely, because of back pain, until a specialist gave me some diagnostic electric shocks just above the sacrum and all my familiar leg symptoms lit up clear as day. Turns out it was all the sciatic nerve.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

Pain tells you there's something wrong but doesn't necessarily come with a diagnosis. Feet seem to be special to. (Can't speak for myself, I never had a broken bone.) After a fall, my Mom went for two months before consulting a doctor and having a broken bone in her foot diagnosed, and the same thing happened to a co-worker of mine with both of her heels.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's true, and yet as the doc went through the possibilities and eliminated them one-by-one I was like Oh duh! I should've known! I mean, something like whether the pain is localised on the top of the foot (where the bone is near the surface) or below it (where it's all soft tissue) is very obvious.

But, yeah, the usual mistake is the one I made the first time--and which my sister made recently when she broke her toe.