My foot is still sore...

7 months after surgery to correct a bunion, hammer toe and two claw toes on my right foot.  I can walk, I can even run, but it is never pain free and some days it is too painful to even walk much.

I had the surgery because my deformed toes were causing me to favor the outside of my foot when walking or, more important, running.  This in turn put stress on my knee and eventually I was unable to run more than a mile without getting severe pain in my knee and down the outside of my leg.

I knew that the recovery period would be long and was warned by my surgeon that the pain and swelling could last up to a year.  I was in a post operative boot for 2 months, then, once the pin was removed from what was the hammer toe, a surgical shoe for one month and that would have been longer but for a very smart suggestion from a colleague who had been through the same operation.  I bought two pairs of cheap shoes, one pair a size larger than the other.  With the smaller shoe on my left foot and the larger on my swollen right foot, I was able to walk with more comfort and even drive again.  However, there was still a lot of pain, mainly from the area where the bone had been cut, reshaped and screwed, this to straighten my big toe after the removal of the bunion.  So, as soon as my surgeon considered the healing sufficient to allow removal of the screw I went under the knife again, although this set back my recovery time by another two months, it alleviated a huge amount of the pain I was suffering.

The next two months I was allowed to do pretty much anything with the exception of running and jumping. Jumping was not a big sacrifice, but I was getting anxious to get back to running, not least because without that exercise my body size was increasing at an alarming rate.

Since the beginning of September, six months after the original surgery, I have been slowly rebuilding my lung capacity - even with the pain in my foot, I can run up to a mile, but not with these lungs laboring under the illusion that they had been retired, and worse, laboring under the excess weight.  So I do quarter mile run, quarter mile walk for 3 miles on the days my foot allows me to, the other days, like today I get frustrated and try to console myself that at 67 years of age I really can't expect to recover as fast as a 30 year old.  But I am going to keep on trying to!

I posted a photographic record of my journey from deformed foot to now on the page titled 'Beware - Gross Foot Photos' so that you may choose to gross yourself out or not.