After months of not understanding and waiting and visiting doctors I finally got ’the verdict'. A little hook on my bone was causing this crazy amount of pain that prevented me from walking and standing, and it could not be removed. The solution was: prevent the foot from unrolling. This could be achieved by bringing shoes to a specialist shoe maker who would add a stiff sole under the shoe and make some additional changes that all together would help the foot ‘roll’ over the bottom of the shoe instead of using the foot itself.
The idea was: no moving of the foot would mean no scraping of the tiny hook. The bruising around this hook would diminish over time (guesstimate: a year) and I would regain reasonable mobility.
Wow.
[Now you also know why you see me wearing the same boots over and over! You can imagine I don't have many pairs since only 2 get covered by insurance and the adaptations are quite costly :-)]
THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING
It took me a few weeks to get used to this new way of walking. I’ve had many walking problems in the past, and the irony is: I never walked more straight up than I do with my super adapted shoes! I felt like a marching soldier while walking on these shoes! It was a weird and unexpected experience and made me feel vulnerable at the same time. I walked so straight no-one suspected I was in pain. So walking through shopping streets or using public transport? I still got shoved or frowned uppn when using one of the last sitting spots because I am this healthy youn looking woman! Why bother looking out for me? (But well, that’s a subject for another blog.)
Although I finally had an answer on what went wrong with my left foot a nasty little voice kept bugging me: why did I have the feeling this was not the whole story? Why did I experience pain in my right foot as well? How could that be, since the diagnosis was based on the assumption I’d had ‘trauma’ in the left foot - how could then pain in the exact same bone in the opposite foot be explained? Was I crazy? Was I so obsessed with my foot I was imagining things?
But one day, when I turned on my feet towards the trash can in the kitchen and a sharp unmistakable pain went through the foot I decided I would no longer ignore this. I made an appointment and went back to the doctor who had helped me so well before.
BACK TO THE HOSPITAL
“Wow, you REALLY are a puzzle!” she exclaimed while she immediately scheduled additional tests and scans for me. We laughed, but I wasn’t sure it was funny to have a doctor looking at you like she’d never seen something like it before.
Some bone scanning and weeks of waiting later she called me. “I honestly still don’t understand how this is possible”, she told me. "You have damage/arthrosis in your right foot as well. On the exact same place you have a hook in your left foot. But this makes no sense! The hook in the left foot can only have been caused by trauma, but if that’s true we can’t explain this other arthrosis in the right foot! I will schedule your case in a meeting with specialist doctors where we go through difficult cases, and after that I’ll get back to you."
Ever watched Dr. House? I felt like on of those patients.
To keep the long story short: ‘Team Dr. House’ reviewed my case and concluded we will never be absolutely sure what has cause the symmetrical damage in both feet. But what they came up with is I might have had a very uncommon childhood illness that specifically influences the talus bones in children under 6 years old. After that the illness disappears, the bones stay a bit underdeveloped, and you can live your life without ever knowing. In my case? I might have challenged the bones a bit too much during my travels. Walking more than average with a backpack/extra weight on my back. The underdeveloped bones might be the reason why my left foot could be traumatised so easily by simply walking steps. It can also explain why the right foot got arthrosis as well: from compensating the pain in my left foot AND let’s not forget I kept on walking until 2 months after the ‘accident’ before even arriving at the first hospital.
FINAL WORDS
So there we are. My diagnosis. A childhood growth illness, causing underdeveloped bones in specific bones in my foot, which than got damaged while travelling (trauma) and overcompensating for that trauma.
Oh, there's still so many stories to tell. Like how it was like to return to my home country without having a home :-) Or, the unrelated to my foot travel stories themselves. But these are, and will be, and had to be written: the final words on my diagnosis :-)
All pictures on steemit.com/@soyrosa are created and edited by me, Rosanne Dubbeld, 2001-2018. Contact me if you want to discuss licensing or collaborations on creative projects :-)
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