My Left Foot

This morning when I climbed out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I had to double check to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a boning knife balanced somehow on end, by happenstance in the spot where my left foot landed. From my position (curled up on the floor, writhing in pain) I was a little surprised to find no knife. Not even the anticipated pool of blood. Instead I discovered a tiny lump just where the arch of the foot meets the first joint of the second toe. A lump from which the stabbing pain emanated. Nay, rocketed.

Naturally, my first thought was that I am in the end stages of some rare variety of cancer. And it figures that of all the cancers that might kill me, I would get stupid foot cancer.

Of course I did what I always do when I want to confirm my worst fears about physical symptoms. I Googled it, searching out gory photos of eventual oozing and malformation accompanied by grim texts describing the hopelessness of the situation or the required arch transplants with a 13% success rate.

The good news is that Google says this lump is unlikely to be a plantars wart associated with HPV infection. So I’m not going to get a reputation as a foot-slut. At least not that way. For a few minutes there, I thought I was going to have to call up all the people with whom I’ve recently had foot sex and have that awkward conversation. (Lola would be pissed. Not because I might have transmitted the foot-slut disease to her, but because she would be sure I suspected that she was the foot-slut who gave it to me. She would have been right.)

More likely, my disabling pain is product of plantar fibrmatosis. Which, according to an assortment of Googled opinions and musings, is an aspect of the broader problem of C-T Band Syndrome. C for Calf. T for Toe. And the Syndrome is for the range of unpleasant things that can happen when the band that runs from your calf to your toe is subject to overstress. Like from being on your feet a lot without adequate stretching. Or, in my case, I suspect, from having the ill-chosen favorite exercise of calf raises. And doing like a hundred of them yesterday, just to see if I could.

(The even better name for this problem is Ledderhose Disease. Which sounds too similar to Lederhosen to be a coincidence, if you ask me. I cannot locate an explanation about how Lederhosen may cause foot pain. Perhaps Lederhosen can alleviate foot pain. Where can I get Lederhosen?)

Now I’m doing calf stretches, but it just doesn’t have the same thrill as calf raises. There’s no shivery burn when I stop, just a vague feeling of stretchiness.

According to Google, it could have been worse. I could have been traipsing along and suddenly snapped my Achilles tendon. I know a guy who had that happen once when he was playing tennis. He said the snap was so loud, he’d thought at first he’d been shot in the leg. Then he sat on the tennis court and actually watched his tendon recoil up his leg into a massive ball on his calf, like a some kind of serpent burrowing into his flesh. Cool, huh?

Of course, he passed out, so I wasn’t able to get more details. Plus no one was there to take pictures to post on the internet. From what I understand, his tennis partner called an ambulance and he went to a hospital. So in a way he was lucky. It never once occurred to him that he might have end-stage foot cancer. And he never even had to even imagine making that awkward series of calls to acknowledge that he was some kind of foot-slut. All he had was several months in a leg cast and unfathomable time and freedom to Google every minor symptom he could possibly imagine. How lucky is that?