GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1060: MY BODY IS A ROADMAP OF PAIN

 

It's been a while since I looked at the state of my body, so why not do an accounting tonight? I agree with Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners, so I'm not going to go into old injuries. Just the current state of things. We're going to start with my bad foot, and in case you're unfamiliar, you can read this GF from a half-year ago about the cage. If you want to go further back, you can check this out.

Some of those lines are because I just took my sock off, but those dark spots and dents are going to be with me for the rest of my life. Which is OK with me because I'll still have my foot, which I was convinced I was going to lose. And here's what the bottom of it looks like:

No hole! I forget if I posted a picture of what it looked like when wound care expanded the hole after the GF I linked to above, but it was a lot bigger by then, maybe the size of a quarter. And there were two holes on the bottom of my foot. When I first got the cage taken off, I marveled at how smooth and soft the skin was, which is weird because I've had callused feet from years of walking everywhere. It was like I had new skin, which I sorta did. The dead toe is even fixed. The holes in my bone are still healing, so I'll wear the ankle brace for quite a while longer, but most of the pain from the foot is gone.

Photo by my podiatrist.

(I should also mention that there was a hole on the side of my foot. When they took the cage off, it had healed, too. Now it has opened back up a little tiny bit, and it's not closing. I may need surgery to seal it up, in which case I'm going to have to go back to sponge baths for a month or so. See? It really is open just a sliver.)

Moving up to my guts, I'm glad to say that I haven't suffered my mystery illness since I lived in Joliet, where I took the picture of the cage in the first GF link above. There are times when I feel like it's coming back. A couple of weeks ago I puked--still not sure why--and I freaked out, thinking I was going to suffer it again. Joliet was bad, too. There had to be something there setting me off. I suffered it just about every day for a while there. I suspect it was sleeping on the air mattress that did it.

I am, however, backed up like crazy. I've been on opioids for years, and that is a sad but real side effect. It comes in liquid form, as we learned that it can actually stop the mystery illness if it hasn't already progressed too far. I call it my laudanum, and I'm grateful to have it. Because pain has been a constant in my life for a good long time.

Because my back is fucked the fuck up. I have bulging discs, and the spinal injections are no longer helping. I went to PT for a couple of months, and I'm still doing the exercises I learned there. It does help, but I suspect the only thing that will cure me is surgery, and I really don't want someone opening up my back. I live alone, far away from any friends or family who might otherwise help me get through recovery from such a surgery. To say nothing of the risks.

And then there's my hands. A few years back I had a form of tendonitis called trigger finger in the index on my left hand and the middle on my right hand. Surgery fixed that up, but I developed it again, this time in the middle on my left and the index on my right. I got injections for those, and they worked wonderfully. I spent a few months free of pain in my hands, and I thought I was finally done with that bullshit.

And then I bought a bookcase off Amazon. I figured it would be easy to put together. I've done it before, and I expected to do it again, but the bookcase was a piece of shit. I had screws I had to put into the base of the bookcase, screws that were supposed to hold the bottom together. Guess what: there weren't holes where the screws were supposed to be inserted. No problem, I thought, I'll make my own holes, which I did. Oddly, that was the sturdiest part of the bookcase, because as I moved along, it fell apart because the material was so shoddy, it might as well have been built of matchsticks.*

What I didn't know until the next day was that I'd fucked my hands up again. In trying to get this piece of shit to stick together, I'd given myself trigger finger all over again. In both hands. And look at that, the doctor who did the injections for me just retired, so now I have to go through the process with another doctor. I don't expect to get those injections for a few more months.

I'd actually been slowing down taking my laudanum, but now that my hands hurt again? I'm very glad I managed to squirrel a little extra away. It's not great. My fingers lock up and click all the time, and I use them a lot. I'm using them right now, in fact. While the pain is numbed reasonably well, the laudanum doesn't stop my fingers from locking in uncomfortable positions.

Moving on up my body, we come to my teeth. They've never been great, but I chipped one of my crowns in the back of my mouth, one of the two implants I have, and because it would be so expensive to fix it, I've let it go for now. Half of the crown is still there, and it's still anchored in place, but the jagged edge is doing no favors for the side of my mouth, and I have to be careful when eating, lest I chew on my beloved mucous membrane.

Which brings us to my eyes. I'm fairly certain I'm going blind. I've been warned that I'm showing signs of glaucoma, and one of my eyes is developing a neat little cataract. But my problem is with the floaters. Both eyes have giant floaters in them, which gives me a lot of trouble when I'm doing my absolute favorite thing to do on this planet: reading. I'm told there is a cure for it, but I'd have to be blindfolded for two weeks while staying in bed, face down the whole time. Again, I don't have anyone in my life right now who could help me recover like that, so that's out, too.

This and a bunch of other things have me feeling exceptionally depressed right now. It was so bad that on Monday and Tuesday this week, I blew off my to-do list. I worked (which led to its own set of frustrations), and that was it. I couldn't even pick up a book. I didn't want to do anything at all, so I sat and stared at the wall for a bit, thinking about my situation. Thinking about going down the block to the liquor store, because if I was failing this badly at life, I might as well fail all the way.

But that would have required the effort of leaving my apartment, and I was so demoralized I couldn't even do that.

That's a thing I don't like about me. When something starts going wrong, and my immediate efforts to fix it don't work, I spiral and start thinking, well shit. If I'm going to fuck this up, why not make it the biggest fuckup I can possibly make it? And then I watch in horror from somewhere in my head as I tank the fucking thing on purpose just to satisfy this wretched impulse.

I've gotten my shit together (somewhat). I finished my to-do list yesterday, and I'm almost done with today's (this is one of the three last things. After this I have to mark the day off my calendar (because I swore to myself this year I'd pay more attention to passing time), and I have to go to bed. So I'm reasonably sure I'll succeed at that. I don't recall if I've gone into it before, but if I complete my to-do list, I reward myself with putting a dollar into an enveloped marked FUN FUND. Money to be spent solely for fun purposes. Not to be used to pay bills or buy groceries, etc. I've gotten so good at it that those two days I blew off earlier this week were actually a little painful for me.

But it's evidence that I'm at least moving in the right direction. For now, that's good enough.

______________________________

*I got my money back, but they said to not bother returning it. I don't suppose anyone out there wants to come by my place in DeKalb and help me put it together . . . ?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1044: WHAT THE FUCK?

 Yeah, these things are getting harder and harder to post. Today, for example, I just ran out of time with everything. I'm lucky I got to write anything at all earlier today. I'm going to rethink how I do these. Maybe I don't need to put them together last minute. Maybe I can chip away at them over the course of the day. I did that a few times, which I always admitted to in those essays.

Ordinarily I would have had one for you yesterday, but I didn't get home until 8 pm. My bedtime is usually 9-ish. Every time I sit down to write a GF, I look at the time, and I think, what the fuck? Is it really that late? I need to get in bed right now if I'm going to wake up on time tomorrow.

That kind of thing. So I don't know when I'm going to post them from now on. It won't be a regular thing. Who knows? They might be a pleasant surprise for everyone, me included.

I was late getting home last night because I saw my podiatrist. I usually have to be added on as the last appointment of the day, which is after the office closes. I expected to get home at 8:30, but traffic was fucking amazing going to DeKalb. I made it in barely under an hour, which is the fastest I've made that drive so far. (She's in Lombard, for those local to the area.)

By the way, she horrified me again with another Terrible Story in Leg Cage History. Since my phone died, I no longer have pictures of my leg with the cage on it. I'm sure I've posted them here before, if you want to go hunting. But imagine wearing one of those, with metal rods going through your flesh and bone, and then deciding, what the hell, doing some Stair Master exercises would hit the spot right now.

The story about the guy wearing it for a decade is just gross, but the Stair Master thing? That's a real dick-shriveler.

She also referred to the slight opening I have on the side of my foot as "the bane of my existence." I concurred. It's one of the many banes of my existence, personally.

To quote Hunter S. Thompson, "OK for now." I'm not sure when we'll meet next, but to quote my grandfather, who bore some resemblance to HST in his younger years, "Sweet dreams, pleasant dreams, and all that kind of gas." He would pronounce that last word as "gazzzzz." TL;DR: Goodnight, fuckers.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1036: A CORRECTION AND A QUANARY

 [Well fuck. I thought I was going to do three GFs this week. I gotta stop writing these while high. I wrote this last night and forgot to post it. So you're only getting two this week. Sorry.]

I got sick today. It freaked me out because it felt exactly like my mystery illness. I gagged for a while, hovering over the toilet, and I thought, oh fuck, please, not this again. It's been nearly a half a year. Don't bring this back into my life.

I then called off work, took a very large dose of my laudanum and went back to bed, hoping it was enough to prevent a trip to the ER. It was. I drowsed for a bit, and when I came back to myself, I no longer felt sick. It left me with a half a day of free time I didn't expect to have, so I figured why not make a correction to GF?

Recently I wrote about my awesome podiatrist and surgeon, the doctor who saved my bad foot. You can read about it here. I saw her again since then, and she was cleaning up the callus around the tiny slit in my foot when she sat back suddenly and looked at the area. "It's open just a sliver."

OK, good. She'd probably had a really long day before. All the same, she wasn--wait a minute. Does she read Goodnight, Fuckers? Probably not. What are the odds, right?

But what if she did? I casually made a few references to that particular GF, and I figured, if the McDonald's straw thing doesn't do it, then she really didn't read it. She laughed at it, but I sensed no recognition. Ah well.

She then went off to get some bandaging supplies for me. I sat there, putting my ankle brace back on. When she came back she asked me if I'd been tall all my life. I told her I'd been six feet at a very young age, and she said that I was lucky. She said that people regularly put the stuff she needed on the top shelves, maybe sometimes on purpose, so she had to climb up to get this stuff.

I found it very difficult to imagine my podiatrist, an exceptionally capable woman, feeling inadequate about anything. She saved my foot. I think the world of her.

I liked my previous podiatrist, too, but he took the better portion of two of my toes, so . . .

What's the quandary part of this? The whole thing made me wonder, who are all you lovely fuckers who read these columns? I know about a few of you, as you've discussed several of these with me, but what about the rest of you?

I know that about 20-ish of you read these things as intended, the night they're posted. Then, over the next few days, the numbers snowball up to 40-60. If it's an interesting topic, that number is closer to 80-90. And then it tapers off . . . until I check back in a month, where the business-as-usual ones are around 150, and the interesting ones are anywhere between 200-300. Every once in a while, there are more of you. On one grand occasion, there were 663 readers. So damned close! And no, I won't tell you which one. I don't want you all to flood it beyond that coveted number.

If you have reason to suspect I don't know that you read these, please take this opportunity to let me know in the comments.

Just kidding. You don't have to worry about that. No one ever comments. [IMPORTANT NOTE: Insert LOTR-keep-your-secrets meme here. Don't forget to delete this part in the brackets! These people look up to you, and you don't want to look like an idiot.]

But if you do feel moved to tell me about it, I'm interested to know.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1033: A HORROR BEYOND COMPREHENSION

[QUICK NOTE: We found the movie from last night's GF! Thank you, everyone, for your help! It's called Pledge Night, and I just watched it. My friend remembered it pretty well, at least the second half of it. I enjoyed it. I can see why it stuck in his head.] 

It's been a while since I gave you an update on my bad foot. It's been healing pretty well. There are still divots where the rods went through my leg, but they're closed up. Some of this bruising probably won't ever go away. The hole on the bottom of my foot is gone completely. The one on the side is still sorta there. It's mostly a dry patch of flaky skin, but recently it ballooned out before dribbling pus and flattening down again. I had an appointment with my podiatrist coming up, so I kept it clean and changed the bandage regularly, something I've become all too familiar with.

The x-rays looked good. The holes in my bone are still there, but they're finally closing up. They're more of a smudge on the x-ray instead of clearly defined holes. As for the discharge, the tests came back positive for an infection, so I'm back on antibiotics. But my podiatrist cleaned everything up and pronounced it to be a minor thing.

"It's just open a slither," she said.

I wondered if maybe I'd misheard her, but she said it again a few more times. I let it go because it was kind of cute. Adorable, actually. It also proved that she had a flaw, if not flaws. She gives off such a confident feeling that one sometimes gets the impression she might be invincible.

Once upon a time she'd told me I was her favorite patient. I'd suspected that for a while, but I was glad to have it confirmed. She's a very straightforward, professional person. "Exact" is the perfect word for her. I often got the feeling that she saw me as a challenge, and she was fully vested in whipping my bad foot back into shape. If anyone could do it, I knew it would be her. Proof positive that I was in good hands.

"But you make me nervous," she sometimes says. This time she adds, "I'm afraid that when you come in, I'm going to see the x-ray, and the bones in your foot will have collapsed, and you'll  have a bone sticking out of the bottom of your foot."

Yes, I silently agree. That terrifies me, too.

Recently she offered an option that would ensure my foot would completely heal, but it would involve putting a bigger rod into my leg, this time into the bottom of my foot and up. After being in the cage for so long? I said no thank you. I'll take my chances.

"There are so few of us who specialize in Charcot," she told me at this recent appointment, "and we all know each other."

Many fields are like that. Horror writers all know each other. Or if they don't, they at least *know of* each other.

She then told me about a horror beyond comprehension. A colleague of hers told her about one of his Charcot cases, and that guy got his bad foot put in a cage, too. But this podiatrist didn't get to see the case through to its conclusion. One day the patient stopped showing up for appointments.

10 years later (and keep this in mind, because holy shit) he sees his patient again. He's living on the streets. [Holds flashlight under my chin.] AND HE'S STILL GOT THE FUCKING CAGE ON HIS BAD FOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[If you were reading a Brian Pulido Chaos comic, this is where someone would scream, "Oh the humanity!"]

I sat there stunned while I was putting my ankle brace back on. I thought back to when I was in the prep room waiting for the surgery to remove the cage. The most horrifying thing I could think of in that moment was that something was going to come up, and they weren't going to be able to take it off, after all. It's the thought that repeated itself like an alarm in my head, over and over again, because in that moment I couldn't imagine a worse fate. Some dude could have walked into my room and shot me in the heart (a very real possibility in my country), and that still would not have been a worse fate.

I tried to blank out as much of my cage time as possible, but I was in that fucker for months. I couldn't imagine being in that infernal contraption for a year, much less fucking ten of them.

She'd warned me way back when about something called Cage Rage, when people in my situation lose their shit and start kicking anything and everything with their caged foot. In the days leading up to the removal, she'd congratulated me on not suffering from it ever, not once.

"I was frustrated," I told her. "But I knew it wouldn't have made any difference, and it might have even made everything worse."

She brought it up again now, and I thought, no, if I'd had that goddammed thing on my foot for ten years, I wouldn't have just been full of Cage Rage. I would have Cage Supernovaed. I might even have gotten frustrated enough to saw my own fucking leg off. I could not have taken ten years of metal rods sliding through my leg like a straw through a cup at McDonald's. And if things had gotten so far gone that I was living an unhoused life? I would absolutely have drank my liver into a bad case of suicide. One hundred percent.

How the fuck does that guy stand it? And how the hell didn't his leg get infected? I kept mine as clean as possible and even had help from Home Health, and I still got an infected pin site. How didn't that leg rot off on its own?

I couldn't stop thinking about this for the rest of the day. I came to this conclusion: I'm a lot more fortunate than I think sometimes. My foot is nearly entirely healed. Not too long ago I thought for sure I was going to lose it, and then I was going to drink myself to death Nic Cage style, but I wasn't going to bother going to Vegas. The cage thing could have been a lot worse. Also: what are the odds that I'm afflicted with something like Charcot, and I just so happen to have one of the very few Charcot specialists in the country as my podiatrist? Not only that, but she's determined to succeed. Her success is my success.

(OH DEAR GOD NIC CAGE RAGE!)

I'm pretty optimistic that my foot is going to completely heal, and then I'll be able to ditch this ankle brace. Maybe stepping in that broken glass was a good thing. Before? I'd been getting around on a leg brace. When this is all done, I won't even need that.

Life is fucking weird. I wouldn't have it any other way.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1014: GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE CAGE

 

And hello to the cast.

I woke up at 3:30 am this morning to get the fucking cage removed from my bad foot. When I was in preop I was advised that I would have a cast on, but I'd be able to walk short distances. No more walker. However, when I woke up after the operation, they told me that I can't walk anywhere, and I can only put my foot down to balance myself. I still need the fucking walker.

That pisses me off to no end, but at least I'm no longer in agony anytime my bad foot so much as twitches. It's also good to know that if I start to fall over, I can put my bad foot down and not get sent to another galaxy with the shock of pain. And hey, look at that bandage on my toe! The surgeon removed a couple of giant scabs while she got rid of the cage. I got those scabs because . . .

OK, I lived in a friend's basement in Joliet for a while, but the floor down there was hardwood, and I had an air mattress. So I had to roll out of bed every day and climb up the walker, and I couldn't do that without fucking up my toes, which were sticking out of the cage. So yeah, those scabs had been there for quite some time. (I should also mention that once, after rolling out of the air mattress, I noticed that the floor had bent back my big toenail. Good thing I couldn't feel that. I must have done something similar this morning because the same toenail was bent back. I didn't notice until I got to the hospital.)

I'm in a much better mood today, but I'm still kinda fucked in regards to being able to move around. I have a bit more freedom now, but not much more. I was hoping I'd be able to unpack all these boxes and get my study ready for work. With these restrictions, though, it might be a long time before that becomes a reality. I'll do what I can, but that's not going to be much.

I was also hoping to get my microwave from storage. It's pretty far back, and I have to move a lot of stuff to get to it, so that might not happen for another month, either. Holy shit, I really need to get back to work to earn at least two weeks of wages, or I'm going to have some financial issues, too.

I think I'm going to have to go back to work with the walker. Fuck. I was hoping not to do that.

But last night's GF had the desired effect. I did not stop off at the place down the street for a bottle. At least the docs gave me some fentanyl as they rolled me into the recovery room. That was a nice little treat on my way out of surgery.

I haven't felt any pain yet, so I hope that part is over. Not having metal rods going through my leg has improved morale around here, but it's good to know that I still have my laudanum just in case.

It'll be good to sleep in tomorrow. Goodnight, fuckers.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1008: THE SLIDING PAIN

 For the last week or so, I've been in worse pain than usual in my bad leg. It sucks because I have to put weight on it when going up or down stairs, so I can't exactly ignore it. But I had a suspicion as to why the pain is so pronounced there.

I have a skin infection. I was worried about a bone infection, because if that happened, I'd have to lose my leg from the knee down. But that's not what's causing the pain.

No, one of my pins is loose, and my leg, at about calf level, is sliding back and forth on that rod.

That's right, a rod that goes through my leg. Impaled. And the hole in my flesh keeps sliding back and forth whenever I stand or use the walker.

The podiatrist said it looks good, but then she said, "How would you feel about wearing this thing for another two months?"

Abso-fucking-lutely not. She said she figured, but she wasn't convinced that the bone she worked on previously had fused, so she wants me in a cast for a full month after this cage is removed. She added that the risk of bone infection did increase the longer this thing is on, so yeah, I don't want to wait any fucking longer for that. I do, after all, eventually have to return to work.

I'm just glad the tests came back negative for a bone infection. That would be just what I needed during this horrid fucking period of my life.

15 more days to go before this fucking thing comes off. I can't wait.

Also, the podiatrist said that this is when patients start to experience Cage Rage, where they scream to have the cage removed, and they keep kicking the cage against walls and such. I have not done any of this, no matter how eager I am to get this cage off my foot. Screaming about it won't help, anyway.

15 more days. Just 15. The countdown continues.

DON'T GET THE 'BEETUS, KIDS: PART 2

 If you've ever wondered what my foot looks like with all those pins through it, BEHOLD!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't see the bottom of my foot, so I don't know how the hole there looks. But while talking with my podiatrist, the surgeon who put the cage on me, I called this thing a "horror show." She said, "Oh no, I think it's really quite beautiful!" I'm going to take that as a sign that this is supposed to look at this. Ergo, I'm healing.

Only four more weeks in this thing . . .

DON'T GET THE 'BEETUS, KIDS: PART 1

 Not a Goodnight, Fuckers. I should be in bed because I have to be up super early for my surgery, but I'm still wide awake. They did not forbid smoking weed, so I'm about to do a bunch of that to get to bed. In related news, I've just taken my last regular shower for possibly 3 months. I changed my bandage for hopefully the last time. And I thought you might want to see what the horror looks like. The first picture is safe. So is the second. The third is a bit iffy. The fourth should not be viewed by anyone who doesn't want to see a hole in the bottom of my fucking foot because holy shit, it looks bad. If you're into gross shit, then that one will scratch the itch.

The freshly changed bandage! By the way, if you were to look at this part of my body tomorrow night, you'll see a cage installed around that leg with pins going into my bones. I'm going to be pretty sloppy on painkillers the first week as a result. Now, prepare yourself for my horrible toenails, which are impossible to cut with clippers at this point.

And now let's get inside that bandage. Let's take a look at the hole on the side of my foot. I can't see that side very well, but I was told by the doctor that she could see bone through it. Thankfully that is not visible here.

I'm not allowed to clean my foot, by the way. Anything above the ankle is fine, but below is a no-no. Only Wound Care can do that. And here's the final picture, the really fucked up one. I'm used to it by now, but holy shit. Last chance. If you don't want to see this, look away.

The white crescent is the callus growing back, a common problem with those of us who have Charcot.

Speaking of, while the surgeon is in there, she's going to do the Charcot Reconstruction I talked about before. She's going to shave some of the bone off so the callus doesn't get so padded, and if everything goes according to plan, by the time they take the cage off my leg, my foot will be somewhat normal-ish. It will never be normal again, but it will look a lot better. I might not even need my brace anymore! I don't think I'll ever be able to take up running again, but walking! I might be able to go out for night walks again! And I'll have a new neighborhood to explore when that happens!

My first alarm tomorrow morning is 3:30. Holy shit, I'm fucked. All right, they're going to keep me overnight tomorrow, so I won't be posting again for a while. Probably. When I'm sane enough, I'll take pictures of what everything looks like and do part two. Where did I put my pipe?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #984: NOT AS BAD AS EXPECTED

 Remember a while back when I said I might have to make a choice between having a roof over my head and having two feet? I've been thinking about that a lot because, after the move, as I've been changing my bandages, the wound I can see looks worse. Deeper. It doesn't help that there's a brown felt pad I have to stuff in the wound. When it gets wet, which is supposed to happen, it turns into a brown sludge that is supposed to be good for the wound. Unfortunately it makes the wound look scary as fuck when you take the bandages off.

Two weeks ago my wound care doc wanted me to get an x-ray of my bad foot. I didn't have the time that day, but I got it done last Thursday. Ordinarily when I do this, she comments on the results immediately, which always sets my mind at ease.

This time she didn't (and the raw data suggested that my bones and soft tissue were breaking down even further), and that sent my mind into a death spiral of what-if scenarios. I was able to kill the impulse until this Monday, reasoning that she might not have seen them yet but certainly would by the start of the following week.

Nope. So I've been suffering from the most horrible thoughts since then. As I parked in the Center for Health's lot I hoped that it wouldn't be amputation time. This would be the single worst moment for me to lose my foot, especially since I still don't have a real home and another move is going to happen soon. It will have to. I might have the money for one more month here, but certainly not anything beyond that.

So I entered the lobby with dread. I helpfully reminded myself that one wound had bled the night before, and it never does that. By the time my name was called I was practically in the OR saying goodbye to my foot.

Then, after the bandages were removed and my foot cleaned up, the doc came in and said my x-rays looked good. Cue the sigh of relief. She looked at the wound on the side of my foot, the one I can't see, and said that it actually looks smaller, and it's now difficult to see the bone that used to show through.

Then she looked at the wound on the bottom of my foot and said that it was deeper, and there was a new tunnel going through the middle, and she can see bone through that hole. Fucking FUCK. Every victory seems like a pyrrhic victory. What the fuck?

But I walked out of there with no need for amputation, so I'll take it. For now.

And then I had to go to the dentist to get a cavity filled. So my day off from work was a sheer joy today. Nothing but feared infections and numb mouths and drilled bone. Such is my fuckin' life. I remember when it wasn't like that. Could I please go back to that? Please and thank you?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #971: THE PLAN

 I got bad news about my foot last week on Thursday. Things had been going really well. The surgery was a success. All infection has been killed or removed. I was healing pretty well. My new podiatrist (she has yet to cut any of my body parts off, unlike the other guy) told me that if things keep going well, then we'll be able to reconstruct my foot.

But when I saw her Thursday, she said, immediately after she greeted me, "You scare me." Meaning, she's afraid that my foot won't heal and she'll have to cut it off. This was news to me, but when she unwrapped the bandage, her fears were confirmed. She told me I'd popped every single one of my stitches. There were pieces of dead skin everywhere, some flapping around the edges of my heel like pieces of paper (with the same consistency). She cut all of that off, then got to the dead white skin around the clot of stitches. There was an open wound in my foot.

I didn't see it until I changed the bandage on Friday, and it looked like a piece of my foot was ripped out. You know how, if a golfer misses their target, there's a divot knocked out of the ground? It looks like someone knocked a divot out of my foot. I have to pack it and the hole on the blind side of my foot (so I have to pack that by touch), and then I have to put these surgical dressings around it, although now I've added very thick pads of gauze over the packed wounds, then the dressings over those. Then I wrap it in a gauze band and put an Ace bandage around it. It's not a lot of fun, especially shoving stuff into the wounds.

But once again I am faced with the possibility of losing my bad foot this year, which means I'm also facing the return of booze to my life.

There are two options. One sucks, and one sucks really, really badly. The latter is putting a cage around my foot that will have to be held in place with screws attached to my lower leg. It would be weight bearing, which must hurt like fucking crazy. There will be a wound vac attached to my foot, too. Not fun.

The other option is the one I'm going to try. I have to stay off my foot completely for a while. This is unfortunate because I enjoy taking showers, which I will not be able to do. It's back to sponge baths in the bathroom sink. I fucking hate to do that, but I'm stuck with it.

So here's the plan. I need to get a knee scooter. A while back I learned that fire stations lend out things like that and wheelchairs, etc., for free. I know because I borrowed a wheelchair back when I first broke this foot. I got responses from my VMs over the weekend today. Fire stations no longer provide this service. Motherfucking fuck.

I also put out word on social media, but no one responded except for my hetero lifemate, Rob Tannahill, who recommended a knee scooter from Costco. I still wanted it for free, as I have next to no money, but now that I know I can't get one for free, I had no choice but to buy one. It's not the same one from Costco, but I found one even cheaper from them, so I just ordered it.

I can't use a knee scooter in the house. I can only use it outside and at work. In the house (and other places a knee scooter might not fit), I will get around on crutches. The podiatrist told me that I can use the tip of the boot I wear on my bad foot now for leverage. Meaning, I can't put weight on the foot, but if I use the toe, I won't fall over. I have terrible balance, probably from the years I spent drinking as hard as possible without actually dying. I hoped my balance would return, but it has not.

But I can't use the crutches on stairs, so I can't use them to get up to my bedroom. I have also bought kneepads. If I can't get around with the other stuff, I'll crawl like a toddler. My knees are fragile in my old age, though, so the pads are necessary.

If I can do this, I desperately hope my foot will finally heal so I can get it reconstructed. That would be nice. I've been told this will take forever to heal, so I'm guessing I'll still be living like this at least until Christmas.

I'll begin when my knee scooter arrives. Wish me luck.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #952: CLOSE CALL

 That was a scary hospital stay. Good thing I didn't have a bone infection, or I'd be Pegleg Johnny by now. They went into my foot and cut all the garbage out including a terrible pocket of infection that was ON MY FUCKING BONE. I'm stitched up, but I hope that soon that will be done, and my foot will be healed.

Because if that's the case, they might be able to fix my bad foot. I have Charcot's Foot, if you want to know what it is specifically. It turned out that the podiatrist in the hospital is an expert in Charcot's to the point where she seemed pretty excited to work on me.

And then she mentioned something that perked me right the fuck up: Charcot's Reconstruction. If I heal from this infection, it's possible to fix my bad foot! I don't know if I'll be able to do stuff like running and jumping, but the idea that I might not need a brace for the rest of my life is very appealing to me right now. I'd like to walk without worrying about my bad foot constantly, and now I have this ray of hope for the first time in the years since the break that caused this problem.

In case you're new around here, I like to say I broke my foot in an ass-kicking contest, but it's from a stress fracture. I walked too fast on my way to work, in other words. So yeah, if I can put the bad foot behind me (as in healing, not amputation) then maybe I can do other things, like restore myself with exercise. And night walks! I want to walk at night again. I miss doing that. I used to get a couple of miles in a night. That was great.

For now, my foot looks terrifying. I thought I would be able to change the bandages on my own, but now that I've seen what it looks like? I have my doubts. You'd be grossed out by how much gauze I can fit in the drain in my foot. Thankfully I have an appointment with the podiatrist soon so she can take a look at her work. I really hope she's as good as I think she is.

The alternative sucks.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #927: THE FOOT

 It occurred to me that I've never posted pictures of my bad foot. This is going to be a little disgusting, so if feet gross you out, you might want to skip this one. My feet are exceptionally gross.

I'm sure you can tell which of my feet is the bad one even though my good one has fewer toes. You will also be able to surmise that I will never be the object of affection for a foot fetishist. I show that for comparison. Let's remove the bandage.

Look at that horrible lump I've been walking on for years. Now you see why I get around on a leg brace, which is designed to make the heel of my foot take the brunt of my weight when walking. None of the weight goes on the first half of my foot, which is possibly how I got by so long without losing said foot.

We're about to get really gross now, because here's that hole in my foot.

Yeeeeeeeeeikes. You can see why it's so reluctant to close itself. That patch of dead skin it's on is really difficult to heal. I can see new skin through the hole, but it might never reach the surface because of this patch, which can't be removed without a full amputation.

OK, one more picture, and then I'm done.

In case you were wondering, my dead toe is the second from the bottom. It doesn't look too bad for a dead digit, but you can tell it's a little different from the other toes if you look closely. If, for some insane reason, you wish to do so.

Now that you're more familiar with my feet than you ever cared to be, nighty-night. Or, as Gramps used to say, "Good night, sleep tight, pleasant dreams and all that kinda gas." Except he pronounced it "gazz."

Here's something I've never told anyone before. At least, I don't think I have. There's a great big patch of my thirties that can't be accounted for. But my mom used to say the same thing to me every night while tucking me in as a child: "Bonsoir, mon ami. Je'taime, John Paul Bruni." She was a rabid Francofile.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #792: MORE HORRORS

 Since I'm sure you were all horrified by last night's GF, I figured, why not keep the horrors coming? In the time I was off I suffered another injury that could lead to the amputation of my left foot.

I don't have a lot of feeling in my feet. On the surface? Nothing. My pain comes from deep down in the bone. So I could probably walk across broken glass and not feel it.

Before I went on vacation I somehow got three terrible blisters on two of my toes. They're on the bad foot, but keep in mind, my good foot only has three complete toes, so . . . I don't know where these blisters came from. One was tiny and not an issue, but two were big and on a toe I'd like to keep. Not just because it's mine, but also because the corresponding toe on my good foot is gone. And these were blood blisters. I think I probably got them from not having my toes straightened out in my shoes.

At any rate, I took care of the blisters, and the small one healed first. The smaller one of the remaining two healed next, but that last fucker was hanging on for dear life. Finally, after about a month and a half of keeping an eye on this thing, the scab came off, leaving fresh skin underneath. Not that it makes the foot look better, of course. I'm super prone to scars on my feet, so the mark isn't ever going away. I imagine Dorian Gray's feet would look like mine if you could see them in the painting. But at least I wasn't going to lose my foot.

That joy lasted about a day.

The next day was a Sunday. Clean up day. Laundry day. Etc. So I went about my tasks for the day, and I was taking a final shit before I had to clean the bathroom when I noticed something odd. I was stepping in a weird red mark on the tiled floor.

Oh shit. Remember how I said I could walk across broken glass and not feel it?

I lifted my foot (the bad one) and saw that I was bleeding profusely from the sole. And the mark looked pretty big. I hadn't touched any of my dirty bits yet, so I felt around the wound. And would you look at that? The offending shard of glass was still in my foot.

(I also tried to figure out when it had happened. While I was writing downstairs one of my slippers came off. When I noticed it, I put it back on. So in my backwards sleuthing I looked in that slipper and saw a huge spot of blood. So that meant it had happened between me losing the slipper and putting it back on . . . which was three hours ago at that point.)

I folded up a couple of Kleenexes and pressed them into the blood so I could finish the shit, wipe, wash my hands and prepare for the horror of reaching my fingers into the wound to pull the glass out.

Actual photo of me removing glass from my foot.

(I almost just posted the entire video clip just so I could call it "foot-age," but I'm not that cruel. And I'm just too tired to do a Crypt-keeper laugh right now.)

I pulled it out, and it was about the size of my thumbprint. I let it drop into the sink basin for the required tink! sound. And then I had to figure out how to stop the bleeding. I decided to let physics do that, so I got a gauze pad, folded it up and taped it to the bottom of my foot with maybe six feet of medical tape. I went about my day knowing that the situation would take care of itself.

After my shower that night I gave it a close examination. No blood. Nothing looked infected. There was still a pocket in my sole from where the glass had been, but I figured if I kept it clean, I wouldn't have any problems.

So far I have not. That was about a month ago. There is still a nick there, but you can't really tell why. I'm pretty sure I have this thing beaten, but I've learned something about the horrors. When they start, they never really stop. Kind of like when you go in for your first surgical procedure. Once the doctors get a taste for you, they just can't seem to stop cutting.

I'll take it easier on you tomorrow night. Oh! And don't think I've forgotten about my five-part GF series. Circumstances have delayed it, but it's getting done. I imagine it will happen the second week I'm back from hand surgery. Some folks might think I'm crossing the line with that series, but as with all pieces attacking abuse of power, I don't think it will go far enough.

We'll see. I've got a short one for you tomorrow. It won't even take you a minute to read. One for Monday. One for Tuesday. And then I'm going on break again.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #644: FOOT PAIN

 So here's something horrible that happened to me yesterday morning. I woke up two hours earlier than my alarm was supposed to go off. I wasn't sure why. Then, suddenly, my bad foot flared up with pain. I'm not talking about the usual neuropathy that comes with being diabetic. That feels like a needle getting stuck in your foot for one second, two max, and then it goes away for weeks. It sucks, but it's fast.

No, this felt like someone had put a railroad spike into the heel of my foot and kept it there. Then it went away. I felt relief and tried to go back to sleep only to feel it again a couple of minutes later. And that cycle continued for the next half-hour.

My bad foot is fat. Even if you knew nothing about me, you would know there was something wrong with it. I tried looking at it, trying to see if it looked any different, but it was hard to say. I thought maybe putting pressure on it would help, so I stood up for a while and still felt the intermittent pain.

This was it. I was hoping that this day would be somewhere far into the future. Perhaps it would be scheduled for sometime after my impeding fatal heart attack, which was what I was really hoping for. But it seemed like this was the day that I would go to the ER, and the doctors would tell me they would have to amputate.

I sat there on the edge of my bed thinking about calling into work and then going to the ER. A part of me thought maybe I was mistaken. Or perhaps I could keep on keeping on and ignore the pain. Or better yet, I could start drinking again and banish the pain that way. Booze usually did the trick. If I ignored it, maybe the bad news would never find me.

Finally I came to a compromise. I would go about my day and see if the pain kept flaring up. If it interfered with my ability to work, I would tell my supervisors and then go to the ER.

When I went downstairs I felt something crackling in my foot. I hoped it was the usual shit and not something new and worse. I felt pain. Then I made breakfast, and I still felt the pain. I brushed my teeth. I took my first shit of the day. And by the time I got out to my car I realized I hadn't felt the pain for a bit. I waited for it to come back, and it didn't. I drove to work and made it through the rest of my day without the pain.

Maybe it was just a new version of diabetic neuropathy? I don't know. I'm just glad it stopped happening. I still haven't felt it as of this moment, and I hope it stays that way.

Because this pain fucking sucked.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #440: HAVING A BAD LEG SUCKS BALLS, BUT IT COULD BE WORSE

 Today there was a fire alarm at work. Our office is on the third floor of the building, and you know what that means. Yeah, I had to go down three flights of stairs in order to comply with that alarm. In my experience, we don't do drills. There is too much money that we'd lose if we did. So I was fairly certain this was for real, and for a moment I almost hesitated, thinking, "Fuck it. I'm not going down. I guess I'll burn."

To our VP's credit, he joked at first. "Who wanted a break so bad?" he asked. But when people weren't going fast enough to suit him, he said, "I'm the last one out. Let's go!"

I struggled down the steps and told people to go around me. I know my leg's bad. I didn't want to back everyone up. At the bottom my leg felt like it was on fire. I went out to my car to collapse in the passenger seat for a while. The firetrucks showed up, and after a while, it was determined that nothing happened. Except someone pulled the alarm lever. I used my cane to get back upstairs and spent some time hyperventilating in the kitchen, waiting to see if I might have a heart attack.

I swear, if it was some jackass just being a dick . . .

And if I get my foot cut off because of this . . .

But it could have been worse. What if someone in a wheelchair worked in the office with us? What would that person have done? If that was me, I'd be fucking psychotic right now.

It reminded me of something from a few years back. This was when I'd first injured the foot, and I figured that it would heal and I'd be able to get back to my life as usual (silly me). I had to get around on crutches. And this is one of the things my old pharmacy fucked up that CVS does well. The old pharmacy had a handicapped space, but they didn't have a dip in the curb. I was fresh from the hospital, on crutches for the first time since I was in fifth grade, learning to use them all over again. I thought it would be a breeze. Like riding a bike. But it was a lot harder than I thought.

So I managed to get up on the walk, and that was when I noticed for the first time there isn't that dip I just mentioned. I wondered what it would be like to be in a wheelchair and need to get in here. I hoped I never had to find out.

I had to wait for my meds. That was fine. They were just prescribed. So I found a chair and waited, and wouldn't you know it? A guy in a wheelchair went past me to the counter. He needed to wait for his meds, too, and he saw me in a similar predicament. We talked for a while, and I mentioned the lack of a dip in the curb, asking him how he'd gotten up it.

"There is a dip," he said. "It's just all the way down that way." Pointing down the way toward a cafe and a dentist (who is actually now my dentist). The point being, it was so far away from the handicapped space it was barely worth the point of putting it there.

Not enough people think of this shit. I remember when America started making places handicapped accessible, and people started telling jokes about it. Kind of like when we decided to make seat belts mandatory. The resistance to change is strong, even if that change has got nothing to do with that.

That's an awful way to live, which is why I groan every time I hear some dipshit complaining about so-called "woke culture," which doesn't really exist.

I'm stopping now because I promised myself no tangents tonight. Last night got out of control. Believe it or not, I actually cut a tangent from last night. It--nope. I'm stopping.