A Return to Heel Walking !

I haven't said much about it but for the last half-year or so I've been dealing with a case of Plantar 

Fasciitis - which is really inconvenient when you walk as much as I do.

This isn't the first time I've had this issue with my left foot but it is, by far, the most troublesome time.

By the way, as is so often the case, some yahoo got a-hold of this word - the second one - and cocked it up royally. Although there is an SC in the middle of Fasciitis there's no SCHool sound. It is pronounced as shush without the ush. Don't ask me why, talk to the pompous ass that created this word! On top of that very unusual and confusing double II just after the ridiculous SC isn't simply pronounced as eye as in pirate-talk or ee as in eek without the k, but rather as ee-ahh, as in yee-haa without the leading y or the ha in the middle. Yeah, I know. There's no A in there so where the hell did the ahh come from! But wait! The ridiculousness isn't over yet! That TIS ending isn't pronounced tis as in tisk without the k, but as a final linguistic insult is pronounced tus as in tusk without the k. So if you want to take the wind out of the sails of the jackass that came up with this spelling so he could giggle condescendingly at people mispronouncing it, the right way to pronounce the word is Fah-shee-ah-tus 

- - Anyway - -

Apparently it's not clear why, but sometimes the plantar fascia, (Oh hey! there's the A right where it belongs!) that massive ligament that connects toes to heel, gets less elastic and this causes small little tears where it connects to the heel, and sometimes along the arch. The one real treatment, baring surgery, is stretching the plantar fascia so that where it connects to the heel is less stressed and can repair itself, which is exactly what walking on it does.

But when you look up treating Plantar Fasciitis many of the 'solutions' are focused on mitigating the symptoms with things like elevation, ice, stay off the foot, etc., none of which fit into my lifestyle, so I just kept on walking.

Yes it hurt to hike, and frankly, when I was at Garner State Park in December there were times when I would have gladly traded my hiking sticks for crutches as I hobbled along. But sometimes healing hurts! That's why we go to physical therapists. Because, and this is something knee replacement recipients are well aware of, to heal and recover range-of-motion, sometimes we need someone to force us through the necessary pain.  

Based on anecdotal evidence, I have a high tolerance for pain. Things that cripple The Wife I seem to be able to basically shrug off. I buy aspirin, not the ibuprofens or acetaminophens, but just plain old-fashioned aspirin, in the smallest bottles possible because I usually end up throwing much of it away when it has aged to brown years later. But I will admit to taking a half-dozen or so full doses over the past six months.

Anyway - my tolerance for pain and the fact that I tend to avoid people whenever possible resulted in me dealing with my physical therapy on my own. But in the meantime, because banging straight down on my heel HURT, I finally learned to toe-walk. 

 

I say finally learned to toe-walk because when I was a kid I tried to make that my standard method of locomotion.

Why would I do that?

Well one classroom of our elementary school was set up as the library and every class had an hour or so set aside to visit the "library" once a week where you could check out two books. Some classmates walked out with no books but, as a certified (certifiable?) reading nut I always walked out with my allotted two.

Usually at least one of those would be from the large set of pale-green covered biographies of "American" figures from history.

I put American in quotes because the selection was highly sanitized, selective, and focused on white males. And, being "sanitized for our own protection", none of the books mentioned anything gritty, like Benjamin Franklin's sketchy personal fetishes or Wild Bill Hickok's role in helping to destroy the plain's ecosystem and through that his peripheral participation in genocide.

But even though Native Americans were conspicuously absent from these books unless in a supporting role, being an outdoors person, I ate up stories about frontiersmen, trappers, scouts, and the occasional Native Americans. And one of the things I tried to do was imitate my favorite wild figures by walking toe first so I could slip silently through the woods like they did. Something I was never able to master. 

But now I was finally doing it! I was toe-walking - on my left foot anyway. (By the way, turns out toe-walking is no quieter than heel walking, at least in modern boots. What a disappointment that was!)

In the meantime I had pretty much resigned myself to living with the pain, chalking it up as part of this new experience of getting old-er.

But, as this video from mid-way through my week of hiking at South Llano State Park in January shows, suddenly things were improving.

It kinda snuck up on me when I wasn't paying attention, but all the sudden I realized I was hiking with almost no pain and even heel-walking on my left foot again!

Maybe a silly thing to get all excited about, but as a rabid hiker it was a pretty exhilarating moment. One worthy of a short video.

As I'm standing here proofreading this (Over a hot-spot connection through my phone because our satellite internet modem has been down for a week now waiting on someone to show up. - All that's wrong is there's no output voltage from the power-puck but we have to jump through all the hoops anyway and it will be another week before we get the damn thing back on line. Of course, in addition to the call-out charge, there will be no reduction in this month's bill.) in mid March after doing my workout and laps around the property this morning, there's a dull ache in my left heel. Some days it's not there at all, some days it's more noticeable than others, and I'm under no illusion that the issue won't ever return in full hobble-around-on-one-leg force again, but for now I'll take what I can get!