Three Years Ago

Ever since I started working from home on a permanent basis, since March of 2020, I seem to have lost all concept of the passage of time. It feels like we've had our kittens for years (it's only been just over a year) but seems like I last visited South Korea a couple of months ago (it's been more than two years).

But there is a life-changing event that I can never forget because I've put it on my calendar as an anniversary, including the year so that the exact date is never forgotten. It was exactly three years ago, today, that I underwent reconstructive surgery to, as my surgeon put it, "remove all of the pain" from my foot.

Those of you who've been following The Brown Knowser for years are familiar with my foot woes—probably more familiar than you wanted to be, I'm sure.

What I didn't know at the time—or what I may not have understood when my doctor first explained the procedure—was that not only was he going to fuse a bone graft from my hip onto my left foot to correct a degenerative disease, he was also going to remove my arthritic joints and replace them with a metal plate and eight screws.

"When I said I could get rid of the pain in your foot," he later told me, "I meant that I could remove all of the pain in your foot."

He was right.

In the three years since the surgery, I have not experienced any of the pain with which I had been familiar since my late teens. Sure, my foot gets sore if I've been walking for hours but I don't think the pain is any worse than any middle-aged guy gets from being on his feet for a long time. And, importantly, that sort of pain doesn't last for very long after sitting down.

My foot, today.

Sure, my foot doesn't look attractive, with a long scar that runs along the top and another, smaller, that occupies my instep. But I don't care how it looks nearly as much as I care about how it feels. It feels great.

Not all of the feeling in parts of the foot has returned and I get tingling sensations in other spots, but again, I don't care. Those feelings or lack of feeling sure beat being in constant pain.

On my last meeting with my surgeon, a year after the operation, I asked him if he could fix the pain that continues in my right foot. When I was in my 20s, I underwent an operation to correct the same degenerative condition but that surgeon did nothing to fix my arthritis. I'm sure that such a procedure was either unavailable or uncommon in the early 1990s.

My surgeon told me that he could probably remove the arthritic joints but couldn't guarantee that he'd be as successful as he was with my left foot. My left foot, he told me, was his best work to date. "As a surgeon," he continued, "I love to cut," but he said that he'd prefer to wait until the steroid injections that I was receiving for the arthritis were becoming ineffective.

With the pandemic, my injections have been delayed at the hospital. I haven't received a shot in more than a year and the arthritic pain has given me grief for most of 2021. I may have to go to a private clinic for relief.

But I'm starting to think that I should reach out to my surgeon to revisit the possibility of corrective surgery on my right foot. If November 15, 2018, was his best work to date, I'm sure he's done better work since.

It's time to start considering getting rid of all of my pain in both feet.