Mommymobile – Still have it. This is the price I pay for not paying full price for repairs to my own car I guess. Nice that my Mom doesn’t mind (too much) lending me her vehicle for all this time. I actually really like driving it. It’s a Mercury Mariner, and it’s only a year or two old, unlike my ancient (circa 2000) Kia Sportage. I will miss the mommymobile when I have to return it, as the sensation of having my buttocks gently warmed as I drive to work in the morning is not entirely unpleasant. Kia doesn’t care if my buttocks remain cold.

I also like her sassy sunroof, which allows me to have fresh air in the city w/o feeling like I am going to get carjacked if I don’t pay attention to my open window. I don’t like her gas mileage, which is the suck, or how the car leaps forward when I take off from stop signs, making me peel out and sound as if I am a  17 year old boy with a really small penis.

It kinda makes me want to buy a new car, but then I remember how nice it is to have no car payment, and not to worry that anyone will want to steal my own POS car, and I resign myself to however many years la Kialissima has left in it. One thing that I’ve really been enjoying is my Mom’s car stereo, which actually plays real CDs (mine gave that up years ago) and has an excellent speaker system. What’s been driving me nuts though is that when I come off the highway and brake hard I would swear that the volume auto-lowers itself. It’s happened enough times that I don’t think it’s my imagination. I asked my Mom about it, but apparently she doesn’t listen to KMOX loud enough to trigger the stereo turning itself down when she brakes. This morning as I was cycling through some options on the stereo I saw something to do with “brake volume seven” and I think I am NOT crazy, there’s some kind of built-in system for monitoring your speed which assumes I want to lower my volume when i am not on the highway. Has anyone ever heard of such a feature?

Industrial Music – Been listening to a lot more industrial stuff lately, which I enjoy, but I have to laugh and wonder at the names. Why do all of these bands have to be called things like “ChristFuck” and “SkullFuck” and have songs like “Wreath of Barbs” and “Flesh Harvest”? It just makes me laugh. I guess they have to call themselves something, and fluffyBunnyBrains wouldn’t work, but it’s really kind of silly. And this morning I was listening to something on last.fm, the other main listener of which was called “Candy_Slutfuck.” I mean really.

My Job – It sucks. It makes me cry, it makes me crazy, it stops me sleeping. My boss can literally not remember what I have told him from minute to minute. He keeps asking me what I am doing WRT to projects he’s been fully briefed on, in writing, but has totally forgotten. He keeps assigning my dept. new shit b/c he doesn’t remember the old shit he told us to do, and he forgets all the old stuff so never wants results. This means pretty much  90% of my work day is spent composing reports about things that I know he’s already forgotten about and will never care to see. For someone with my practical, results-oriented, allergic-to-time-wasting nature, this is absolute torture. Something has to change.

My Foot – It hurts, I can’t walk, all my shoes hurt me, it sucks. Wearing shoes that don’t put pressure on my broken foot means that my plantar fasciitis has now flared up in the other foot which means I can barely walk on either leg, I can’t do any exercise which is making me exhausted, and the whole thing is fucking depressing.

People - I am having a love/hate thing with people right now. I don’t want to stay home, I don’t want to not do anything, but I am also not in a very patient frame of mind, so I don’t want to inflict that on anyone either. I feel like I am going to freak out on someone, or just have a total meltdown. Dear everyone: I apologize in advance for that shit.

Why my endocrinologist sucks ass – I called him last Wednesday to ask him about my prescription. He’d lowered one of my medications from 2000mg/day to 1500mg day, and I hadn’t noticed until I got home. I assumed he had a reason to do that, so I just took the new amount. Six weeks in and I have full-on return of a lot of my symptoms. (Hi! I am totally broken-out and enraged, anyone notice?) Anyway, it took him SIX DAYS to return my call. Six days to answer a question about a prescription. And when he called he didn’t know what I wanted to ask him, just “had a message to call me.” I explained and he said “Oh no, 1500mg isn’t enough! You need to take 2000mg!” Jeez, thanks for that, glad your medical degree helps you determine such things, shitwit. He called in a new prescription for me, didn’t say he was sorry, didn’t say anything about the fact that he totally has (however inadvertently) totally fucked with my body systems for no reason for the last 6 weeks – didn’t even explain why he needs a week to return a patient phone call – nothing. Just phoned in the new prescription, and bye!

This guy, who I have been seeing since November, has never once asked me to go in for blood work. My old endocrinologist insisted that I have blood work done every three months. This guy could give a shit. I need a new doctor. I am also possibly going to write my insurance company to complain about this incompetent bastard.

This on top of old “ohyourfoot’snotbroken” guy makes me think all doctors have possibly just wandered in off the street and donned white coats. They have no idea WTH they’re doing.

Friday was errand-running during the day, with a surprise appearance by MyTodd™. I bought a new jacket, which cheered me. Then Friday evening was drinking and being irritated. Saturday morning was getting over myself and then some errand-running. I had to run to the grocery store and pick up about 62lbs of meat and seafood for Sunday dinner. Later, Todd and I ended up going out to dinner at Franco in Soulard, which was delicious. I had the mixed greens to start, Todd had the onion soup. We both had the wood grilled bistro steak for our entree, with raito, green beans and pomme frites. I had peanut butter ice cream for dessert, he had an apple tart/vanilla ice cream combo. We loved everything. I especially enjoyed the green beans, since I spent most of my life hating them until once I had them prepared correctly, so now every time I can find good green beans I get all excited. The interior of the restaurant was very nice, low-key, calm and modern. The staff were extremely friendly, to the point of an almost obscenely cheerful obsequiousness. When Todd got up to use the restroom, our server rushed over and refolded his napkin into a fancy shape. That’s a little OTT for me, but it never crossed the line to truly disturbing/offensive.

We skipped the industrial/fetish dance party on Saturday night, though I did hear surprisingly good things about it after the fact. I don’t know, I think I am past the point of finding such things either unique or interesting. Maybe with a big group of people it would be fun, but overall my seediness-tolerance has really gone down as I’ve aged. I want to see less and less of strangers’ wobbly bits, and I certainly don’t want to encounter any of their residual body fluids when I am walking around. I am going to check their mySpace page for pictures from this event, and then judge whether I want to hit it up next month. I am thinking probably no—but then again my mercurial moods are pretty well known.

Sunday morning was food prep for Sunday night (things had to marinate) then some Write Club. We went to Local Harvest cafe, which was too crowded and sweaty for my liking. Also someone there was stinking, and I don’t think it was me. I was hungry but since it was so jammed and I had my laptop I didn’t want to order anything that would take more than a few square inches of table space. I had a chocolate croissant that was passable, but nothing special. Mississippi Mud food is much better. Also, their iced chai was both expensive and teeny-tiny. So what if they grew it in the backyard? Tiresome. We moved over to Mangia where I marveled again at the intestinal fortitude of these people who really do start drinking at noon. Dunno how they do that. I would get too loopy and then have to go take a nap.

I headed home around 3 and started cooking in earnest around 4pm. I was cooking an authentic-as-possible Indonesian rijsttafel for 5 people, and that entailed 3 separate meat dishes, a noodle dish, white rice and fried rice. It takes some organization to have that many things ready at the same time, when you’re only one person. And I am, as far as I am aware, only one person. I made:

• Kip Satay with Gado Gado Sauce (Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce)
• Bahmi Goreng (stir fried noodles with pork and vegetables)
• Nasi Goreng (fried rice with eggs, tomatoes and shrimp)
• Kip Rendang (curried chicken with coconut milk)
• Sambal Stir Fry with Shrimp (Shrimp stir-fried with tomatoes, onions and spices)
• I also served white rice, sereondeng (coconut/peanut topping) sambal oelek (hot sauce) and krupuk (prawn crackers) on the side.
  

I ended up making the stir-fried shrimp and satay first, and keeping them in a 200 degree oven while I cooked everything else. I was afraid they’d dry out, but the shrimp dish had a lot of sauce, and the satay had been marinating for 6 hours at that point, and both seemed as if they handled the wait-time pretty well.

Indonesian food can be a bit of an acquired taste – the first time I had it I thought it all looked like dog food, and I wasn’t enthused to try it, but I think everyone liked everything. A bit of a minor mishap with turning the front burner (with the pork for the Bahmi) as high as it would go, and turning the back burner (water boiling for noodles) down as low as it would go, instead of the other way around. This resulted in some adventures with the smoke alarm, which upset the doggies quite a bit. But the meat wasn’t ruined and I think that dish turned out really well. Overall I am going to call the night a success, even though I never got to the Pisang Goreng (deep-fried bananas) because by that point I was sick of frying things, and we were all stuffed. Molly brought some vanilla ice cream so we had that for dessert, then all sat out on the deck talking shit and having a few drinks. Scooter club was in full effect, so I got to see other people’s reactions to the sound of 25 chainsaws constantly running next door. See, it’s really annoying huh?

Yesterday I had this exchange w/Pervy Neighbor

PN: “Hey we had 55 guys here last night on scooters. Did we keep you awake?
Me: No.
PN: One of these days we’ll find something to keep you awake!
Me: (in my head) You’ve already offered something that you thought would keep me awake and I turned your skeevy ass down. Scooter-related or otherwise, your activities will never disrupt my sleep. Perv.

Anyway, that’s the weekend wrapup. My foot hurts and my knee hurts. I think my foot hurts more since I know it’s actually broken, illogical psychosomatic reaction or not. I think I had just been convincing myself that it didn’t hurt, and now that I know I have justification for it hurting, the pain is more intense. Brains are weird.

I just put in a refill request for Tramadol. My doctor had better refill that shit too, I think he owes me, the misdiagnosing asstard.

Now for my first 5-day workweek in a few weeks, which should be trying.

Went to the doctor yesterday because the “strained tendons” he said would heal themselves in 2-4 weeks had still not healed, close to 10 weeks later. I still can’t stand for long periods of time, if I step on an uneven surface I am in agony, and I get stabbing pains if I try to pivot on that foot. And now, due to adventures with Wii Fit, my left knee had gone all to hell as well, probably from favoring that leg due to the foot pain. So I wanted him to check it out. He poked and prodded, had me stretch and watched me walk, and decided that it was still my tendons, and he was going to send me to physical therapy. He wanted to do some x-rays of my knee, which he said was swollen, to make sure I wasn’t developing arthritis in it. I said that was fine, and that I really needed my foot to start feeling better pretty much right now. I told him that I was surprised it was really the tendons, since the pain was so sharp and wouldn’t go away, and I had been trying to stretch the foot and use it as much as possible. So, probably just to humor me, he decided that as long as I was having x-rays he’d “grab one of the foot, too.”

Some mixups and snafus in radiology and an hour later, I am back in his office. He comes in and tells me he’s “really glad we got a picture of the foot.” Which I knew was not a good sign. Turns out that my foot had actually rebroken back in December, and that it just wasn’t visible in the x-rays back then because it had broken right through the site of the original break, where the bone was more dense. He showed me the pictures right next to each other, and I have to admit that I couldn’t see a break in the January pictures either. But then again, I am not a trained orthopedist. Anyway. This is why my foot never stopped hurting, I have been walking unsupported, uncasted on a broken bone. Yay me, I am fucking hard-ass. “The good news,” he tells me “is that it’s healing really well on its own.” Awesome.

Of course that particular bone in my foot is now about 32″ wide, since it’s re-forming new bone over the other already reformed new bone of the other break. So the chances of my being ever able to wear a narrow shoe again are pretty much nil. And at this point there’s nothing to be done. See, at 10 weeks out, this is just about when he’d be taking me out of the boot/cast whatever they would have put me in if they knew the foot was broken back then. So there’s no point taking corrective action now. His only mandates are that I have to give up Wii Fit for now, can’t do any excessive exercise or walking, should not do lots of stairs (ha!) and I need to come back and see him in a month and we will re-evaluate how everything’s going.

I don’t know how I feel about all of this, honestly. Most of me feels extremely glad that I didn’t know it was broken. Mentally I don’t think I would have dealt well with it. I was so overjoyed when he told me it wasn’t broken – I think the news that I was going to spend another winter in a boot might have really broken my brain and sent me into a major depressive cycle. So in a way it’s much better that I didn’t know. Also, since my calf muscle wasn’t allowed to atrophy, I am less likely to need PT this time around. Also, 10 weeks out is really good, timing-wise. This is when things started to improve last time, so I can look forward to feeling a lot better in a month or so. And it’s also good to know that I am not just a huge pussy, and that there is a reason that the pain wouldn’t go away. Those are all good things. So as weird as this whole situation is, I think it turned out for the best. As long as it continues to heal well and there are no long-term consequences to how I treated it while I didn’t know it was broken, that is. Because in retrospect all the things I was doing to “stretch my tendons” were exactly the wrong thing for a broken bone. (Constantly flexing that foot, putting more pressure on it, standing on my tiptoes all the time to stretch out that joint, etc.) But, we shall see. Just glad to have a diagnosis and further confirmation that I am not entirely crazy. And another reminder for me that no matter what the doctor says, go with what your gut tells you, and question everything.

Fascinating, ain't it?

So doctor’s appt today, much limping to get there, much things wrong with my car’s transmission, etc. Surprisingly the staff remembered me, which means I must have been a highly-amusing and beloved patient, right? Or an unholy PITA, whichever.

X-rays (I think that exhausting my $250 medical co-pay 5 days into a new year is a personal best, by the way.) and waiting around for the doctor, who prods at me and makes everything hurt, then makes up for it by showing me all the cool insides of my foot. There’s a weirdness where the break was, all lumpy up the sides, and there’s still a line there with the original fracture, but NO NEW FRACTURE, bitches. None.

After telling me that he starts explaining something to me about torque, and wrenched tendons, and monkey paws, but by that point I wasn’t listening because all I’d heard was: NO NEW FRACTURE (bitches).

So basically he said I was all injured and stuff, but it wasn’t a break, and I was going to be OK. Then he said if I wanted to wear Das Boot for a few days/week he would support me in that, but he’d also be happy to see me in a shoe. Doctors are so weird-talking. Anyway, I said no way to the boot, asked if I could walk barefoot (I can) asked if I can haz pain meds (I can) and asked how long until it was better (2-3 weeks). And I can SO DO THAT SHIT. In fact, even though it hurts just as badly now, I DO NOT CARE because I know it’s not broken, and that walking on it is not making it worse. I can stand anything if I know what’s causing it and when it’s going to stop. I ain’t ascairt of some pain.

So anyway, that’s me, twisty monkey paw torque foot. Healing. With meds to ease my way. Wearing shoes. Hopefully this is the last time we’re going to need to discuss my feet on this here blog, unless I am rhapsodizing about a pedicure or having someone massage them.

On a side note, I wish I’d asked him for copy of my new x-rays, but I thought that if I was too weird he wouldn’t give me the pain meds. To soothe you I have posted a pic of last year’s x-rays and the terrible, horrible, no-good, really bad Jones Fracture.

Right now not only is my foot painful to walk on, but walking weirdly to compensate for that pain has thrown my back into some kind of spasms, and my right hip is maybe made out of broken glass now, I can’t really tell. And still, I am so pissed off at life that I refuse to accept that there’s anything wrong with me. I haven’t stopped going out, and I absolutely refuse to stay huddled up here in the house. I knew I was good at partitioning, but rarely have I been able to achieve this level of knowing something and refusing to know it at the same time. When and if he tells me that I have to be back in a cast or boot for another 10 weeks, I get a feeling like I might disagree with him, though I don’t know what good that would do me exactly. I don’t know that it’s possible to reason oneself out of an injury, though I would sure like to give it a good try.

Also, I have a strong urge to yell at the doctor when I do see him, no matter the outcome of the x-rays, because he told me this shit was fine. He told me I could return to normal, strenuous activity six months ago, ffs. But he didn’t think to say that strenuous activity didn’t include stepping on uneven surfaces or, by the way, careful there because your particular brand of fracture has a 63% re-fracture rate. Might want to watch for that. Nor (in the case this thing isn’t broken) did he prepare me for the fact that it could possibly be this painful to step on something, this far down the road. At no point in my exit interview with him did he mention “Oh, and you’re going to be insanely tender for the next foreseeable stretch of time, so don’t fret when you’re in agony, that’s all normal.”  It’s just another things that I hate about doctors, the fact that they never mention anything  unless you specifically ask, and how often do patients know what to ask? But in either case (likely-re fracture or exceptional sensitivity) he should have mentioned that shit. Doctors are so cavalier because they see this kind of thing all day every day, and they don’t take into account that for each of their patients it’s always an entirely novel and frightening experience.

Doctors – the same assholish, blase, know-it-all attitude as IT people, but with the ability to fuck up your life much worse by not conveying the proper information.

Oh, and by the way, my Mom’s doing fine, she’s sleeping better now and has calmed down. Because that’s top on my worry list, making sure she’s fine w/my injury.

What, me, angry?

The primary coping mechanism so far has been that trusty family standby “pretending it’s not happening.” I can really make this one work only by sitting down and not moving, since the pain of utilizing said appendage is a pretty steady reminder that there’s an issue of some sort.

The next method = painkillers. They seriously aid in the first (dissociation from reality) method but they have a tendency to wear off and also to make me sleepy and confused.

The last method has been denial of facts in ready existence, a.k.a. “If you refuse to wear a corrective device, there can’t be anything wrong with you at all.” Which is why I am not wearing that foot brace.

And a subsidiary to all of these theories is the “not fair” hypothesis – which holds that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, —was doing housework in fact—and was on vacation. It would be karmically implausible to injure myself in this way under those circumstances.

Honestly, I just can’t imagine that the world is this perverse. This can’t be happening, I refuse for it to be happening, therefore it is not happening. See how that one works?

I’ve had varying levels of pain since Tuesday, at times being able to walk with almost no pain at all (see: painkillers) and at other times having pain worse than when I first had my cast off in April. My toes have been alternatingly numb/pain free/painful, and I don’t know what that means. I wish I had a better understanding of foot/bone mechanics so that I could form a more educated guess as to whether this pain signals another break or not. One part of me says “no way – this doesn’t hurt as much as the original break, so it can’t be another break. Right?” The other part of me sasses back with “Well why hasn’t the pain subsided yet, smarty pants? What do you think you have, a toe sprain?” And I don’t really know enough about how feet work to say that toe sprain is/is not a workable theory.

All I know is that this is a gigantic pile of bullshit, and that I should never have told my mother about it at all, since she’s been steady crying and unable to sleep since I did tell her. For the record: she hates to think of me all alone in this big house with no one to help me, so very alone and by myself, isolated, in this state I am in of being without anyone else here, lonely, by myself and so very alone. Which is very thoughful of her to point out.

Although on the bright side she also posits that my state of solitary, hyper-alone, isolated, single, helpless, gaping void of pointless, useless life is nonetheless better than her some people’s state of being aggravated 24/7 by my father some people who will remain nameless. But is is very hard for her to deal with the concept of me all alone and injured in my bleak, empty household. For the record. But she’s really glad I told her about it because trouble shared is trouble halved. And now she has to go lie down and cry for awhile, while she thinks of my bravery here all alone by myself.

Ahem.

All I wanted him to say is “Pshaw – there’s no way you broke your foot right there again! You’re fine!” but what he did say was “There’s a definite possibility you’ve re-fractured that same bone, as it’s weaker now than it used to be. The intense pain you’re having isn’t a good sign.”

This year just had to kick my ass one more time before it was over, huh? And this fits in line with the Halloween and Thanksgiving Eve crises in my world. Apparently the calm and sane xmas eve I had, with no household and/or health care emergencies, was the anomaly.

For now I am trying to stay off it, keep ice on it, and hope that it’s just aggravated and not broken. It can’t be broken. I refuse to allow that possibility into my world.

Carefully I went down the stairs, one foot at a time, as I couldn’t see where I was going and was soon to be stepping onto a pile of fabric. Not ideal. As I came down off the last step onto the basement floor, I accidentally stepped on a 1″ square aluminum pole that had fallen over when I threw the tree skirt down. It was laying across the bottom stair, so it was angled about 6″ up in the air, and I basically tried to balance on it, exactly on the spot on the bone where I broke that stupid fucking foot last year. An exquisite blossoming of pain across my entire body was the immediate result. I am telling myself that I can’t have re-broken that thing , that I have only bruised it, or angered it or something. There’s no way I re-broke it by stepping on a fucking pole, for fuck’s sake. But it’s all swollen and I can barely walk on it now, and am in some pretty agonizing pain when I try. I have taken a painkiller and I am going to bed.

Also I just realized I left a frozen bag of corn laying on the couch. Fuck it, I am not going back down there.

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See, I developed a condition called plantar fasciitis and boy, is that a fucking bitch. So for the last two months I have been having horrible, stabbing pains along the arch of my foot whenever I get up from either sitting too long, or first thing in the morning. That first thing in the morning pain… OMG that’s a “clinging desperately to the wall, grimacing like a crazy woman, cursing the Fates, limping across the room like a tired old whore” kind of pain. After you take 5-10 steps the muscle stops spasm-ing or whatever it’s doing, but it’s a crazy kind of pain.

At first I thought it would go away, if it was caused by over-use of foot 2 due to foot 1 being incapacitated, but then I realized it wasn’t and decided to do some reading up on it. And after reading scary stuff about foot surgery and permanent crippling pain, I read further and then it turns out I was creating the condition myself and by fixing what I was doing I think I’ve pretty much made it go away.

See the thing is this: my broken foot is still slightly swollen. I don’t know how long that takes to go away, or if it’s permanent because the bone healed slightly wider than before. All I know is that none of my shoes comfortably fit my left foot anymore. So back in early May I took myself to Marshall’s and bought a cute pair of black Bass flip-flops which DID fit, and I’d worn them pretty much everywhere since then. I am not usually a flip-flop person, but these were special circumstances and they’re really cute, for real. This was around the time I was in PT I was having a lot of pain in my broken foot. My therapist suggested a shoe that wasn’t tight around my broken foot, and these fit that bill. This was exactly when the pain in foot 2 started, so I didn’t relate the new shoes to the pain necessarily. But then I read that article that I linked to above, and when it called plantar fasciitis the “flip-flop disease” I suddenly realized the error of my ways. I switched back to my trusty Børn sandals. And even though squishing my broken foot back into them was not at all pleasant, I sucked it up and waited to see what would happen. It’s about a week later and I am extremely pleased to report that (knock wood) my pain in that foot seems to be almost completely gone. In fact I got up from reading on the couch just now and it didn’t hurt at all! Which inspired this post. Because it’s rare that I have tidbits I really think need sharing with the masses, but if you’ve somehow stumbled upon this page because you’re Googling info about pain in your heel or the arch of your foot, foot pain when you wake up in the morning, stabbing pain in your feet, whatever – stop wearing any kind of flip-flop shoes! Wear something supportive, with a slight heel. It will NOT take long to get better if you stop wearing the shoes that aggravate the condition. Seriously.

OK that’s it for this public service announcement and that’s all you will have to hear about my feet. For today.

Now to sort out the tendinitis in my left wrist…