My birthday yielded some life information

Yesterday was my birthday.  Yay me!  I got older!  And the day before that was our anniversary.  Yay!  We still like each other!

My parents watched the girls while we went out to a really nice dinner.  When we got home, the girls were in bed, but not asleep and we heard all sorts of squeaking from the monitor.  My parents had given Teeny Tiny her Sophie to keep her happy.  Well, yeah, it did.  Until we finally took it away from her at 10:30pm.  That was our comedy relief of the evening.  Squeak squeak!

Yesterday started with a follow-up appointment with the podiatrist regarding my ankle.  As the doctor was looking over the fancy schmancy bone scan I got, he said "what the heck is happening with your toe?"  Ummmm, I dunno.  I usually just kind of hangs out at the end of my foot.  He briefly shows me that the base of my toe has a hotspot on the bone scan indicating that there's a lot of blood activity there, as in an injury type of spot that is getting flooded with blood and other bodily resources in an attempt to repair whatever is happening.

We let that go for a little bit and focus on my ankle and yup, he can see that it hurts.  We discuss options, a steroid shot to see if that will reduce the inflammation around my little bone thingy (an oscule?) which might be enough to take away the pain, or doing a minor surgery to go in and pluck the thing out.

My main concern was that only Teeny Tiny is mobile at the moment, and if I'm going to have a surgery that might make it impossible for me to put weight on my leg for a week or two, doing it now is better than doing it a month from now when they are both on the move.  He tells me that the recovery for that surgery wouldn't be immobilizing and I'd be able to put weight on it right away.  So instead we opt for the steroid shot.

Along with the steroid, the fluid also had a numbing agent.  The good news - for my birthday I got a day off from pain!  The bad news - the numbing agent has worn off and I'm pretty much back to square one today.  I'm supposed to keep track of the pain for the next month to see if it goes away or not, I'm not currently optimistic.

So about my toe.  I've mentioned before that I have mutant toes.  My big toe is especially long and my remaining toes are especially short.  It turns out, this combination of factors has been the reason why my feet have always felt sore.  Other than when I was pregnant, I didn't complain a whole lot because I assumed my feet were always sore because I hardly ever exercised and like the rest of the body, when you don't exercise and then use some muscles, they hurt a bit.  So I just blamed my sore feet on being a product of myself being fat and lazy.  Of course, one of the main reasons I've never exercised is because my feet hurt almost immediately when I do and is quite the deterrent to continuing.  Come to find out that my feet don't hurt because I'm fat and lazy, I'm fat and lazy because my feet hurt!  I had no idea that other people don't have sore feet like I do!

I also blamed my hurting feet on shoes that would be too tight across the top because the pain was often right where the shoe creases when you take a step and the pain felt like a long bruise across the top of my foot.  What a minute, when you guys take a step, does your shoe kind of fold and crease across the top?  Is that also because of my mutant feet?

We took a quick X-ray and found that I've got bone spurs in that joint and it's becoming mildly arthritic from years of unevenly over flexing with every step that I take.  Next week, I go in for a full bio-mechanical work up and by next month I should have custom orthodontics that might allow my feet to walk without becoming sore.  By the time the orthodontics come in, we should also know if the steroid shot in my ankle has fixed that problem or not.

The two major things that I've worried about with the girls is passing on my love of crappy food and hatred of exercise.  We're working on the food issue so that we can model good behavior in that regard.  I can't even begin to describe how wonderful it feels to find out that by the time my girls are 2 years old, I might actually enjoy exercise.  That going out to the park to play tag with the girls might be fun instead of torture!  By the time they are old enough to have memories of me, I might not be this blob who makes old man noises when getting off the couch and toddling to the kitchen, I might be a normal sized person who can get up and move without it being a big production.

Happy birthday to me!