Over a month ago, I started to have some really odd foot pain. It’s been only on the top of my foot, and I couldn’t figure out what would make the pain worse and make it go away a bit. It would affect me when I was walking, which seemed normal. But what was so weird was that it hurt a lot when I was sleeping or lying on the couch. When it started, I thought maybe it was just a really bad bruise and I would give it time to go away. But after a few weeks, I knew it wasn’t something simple like that.
I started with a video appointment when a general medicine doctor, mainly because I knew I would need a referral to a specialist. But I wasn’t sure what type of specialist I would need to go to, so I just explained all my symptoms to the doctor and let them determine what the next steps would be. I had some x-rays ordered and the initial results were that there was nothing seen on the x-ray, which was a relief since the first doctor thought it could be a hairline fracture. But that didn’t answer what was causing the pain so I went to a podiatrist.
I was randomly assigned a podiatrist, mainly because I wanted the soonest appointment available. And it happened to be someone I had seen before for a different foot issue. As I waited for the appointment, things weren’t getting any better but they weren’t getting any worse. So I was just hoping that I could get some answers and make sure there wasn’t something really wrong with my foot.
I finally had my appointment last week. I knew going into the appointment that there were a few likely reasons I was having this pain. And those were a ligament issue, a tendon issue, or a nerve issue. I didn’t know which of those I was hoping it would be since none of them would necessarily be easy things to correct. But I also knew that getting a diagnosis was the first step in hopefully getting out of pain.
At my appointment, I reviewed all the symptoms for the doctor and he did a few different things to manipulate my foot to try to isolate the pain. And in the end, he thinks that I have a tendon issue in my foot. When he was pressing on the tendon on the top of my foot, it was making the pain more intense. But the one symptom that I said that confused him was that I experienced pain sometimes when I wasn’t wearing shoes, which made him worry that it could be a nerve issue. But that’s a much bigger thing to deal with so it’s easier to start with a simple problem and try to see if I can resolve that pain from those steps.
And the things I need to do aren’t too bad. I have to tie my shoes differently so they don’t lace over the affected tendon. I also am using BioFreeze on my foot a few times a day to help the pain not be as sharp. Eliminating the pain isn’t going to resolve the issue, but it makes it more tolerable to deal with while I wait for it to get better. And I might be waiting a long time because fixing a tendon issue can take months. I was told that if the pain wasn’t better in 6 months, then I need to return so we could look into some other remedies or see if I need to see someone else to figure out if it’s a nerve issue. But it might take those full 6 months before I feel better. So I’m just going to have to wait it out and hope for the best at this point.
I’m used to dealing with so many types of pain on a day-to-day basis, so it’s not too horrible to have another type of pain in my life. It’s not fun and I wish I didn’t have all this extra pain, but I know I can get through it. And hopefully, before 6 months have passed I will be in just a little bit less pain so I can just have this issue as something in my past that won’t be another medical mystery that needs to be solved.
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