by Joni Cole
One night after kickboxing, I limped into my house.
“I’m never going back,” I grumbled. Whereas before, exercise had temporarily alleviated the pain, now it only seemed to make matters worse. I knew there was no choice but to quit.
“You sure have been complaining a lot,” someone made the comment. Maybe it was my husband, or kids, or all of them. Well if that was how little they cared, then I’d show them.
“How is your foot?” I lived for my family to ask me this question.
“Fine,” I would respond tersely, and that would be the most they were going to get out of me.
By the time I’d finally gotten an appointment to see Dr. Podiatry, six months had elapsed since my heel pain first started. In the interim, I had been treated by two different physical therapists and a sports medicine doctor. My feet had been kneaded, torqued, fed electrical impulses, booted, and, most notably, shot up with enough steroids that I was surprised they hadn’t ripped themselves off my ankles, developed rampant acne, and gone on a shooting rampage from a clock tower.
Regardless, I was still in acute and chronic pain at the same time. This was what I told Dr. Podiatry, as I dangled my bare feet off his examining table.
“Micro traumas,” Dr. Podiatry explained, as he straightened his Santa tie. This gesture only reminded me that my appointment with him had been half a year in the making. It was like getting an audience with the foot Pope. “Your problem,” he elaborated, “has been caused by years of micro traumas to your plantar fascia.”
Micro traumas my ass, I thought. For one thing, that was an oxymoron if I ever heard one. And for another thing, I think I would have noticed years’ worth of traumas. I’m not exactly the type of person who reacts well in a crisis. Dr. Podiatry also told me I’d probably had disgusting warty toes since I was in my twenties.
“So why haven’t I been hobbling around for the past couple decades?” I challenged.
“When we’re young,” he explained, “we recover much faster.”
After I scheduled another appointment with Dr. Podiatry—this one to be fitted for orthotics—I decided I needed some perspective. In my bedroom, I have a big jewelry box containing a hodge-podge of belongings: macaroni necklaces given to me by my kids, some Iraqi money sent by a soldier friend stationed in one of Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out palaces, a feather from my beloved dead cockatiel . . . From this mix, I dug out my Complaint Free bracelet, a purple plastic band intended for behavior modification.
Back and forth, back and forth; every time I caught myself complaining, I transferred the band from one wrist to the other. The goal was to not have to switch the bracelet for twenty-one consecutive days because, supposedly, that’s how long it takes to break a bad habit. The concept of the Complaint Free bracelet started with the minister of a small congregation in Ohio. Since then, he had managed to leverage the idea into Complaint Free seminars, Complaint Free books, even Complaint Free cruises.
If my foot didn’t hurt so much I would print myself a tee-shirt, and here is how it would read: All those healthy footed people got to go on a Complaint Free cruise, and all I got was this lousy bracelet.
I snapped the bracelet onto my other wrist.
Bargaining
Please God, make my foot better and I will never do my Igor impersonation again.
The fact that I was praying made me realize how deeply my prolonged foot pain was affecting me. For one thing, I don’t believe in God, at least not in the form of someone you can sit across from at the negotiating table. Okay God, let’s hash out this deal! Still, in this time of crisis, or at least crisis of confidence (Would I ever be able to enjoy a shower without footwear again?), I seemed to have found religion.
As much as I wanted my foot to heal, I never prayed aloud, not the way people with real faith do. That would have made me feel too self-conscious.
“Please God . . .” I imagined myself kneeling, my hands clasped in supplication.
“Who are you talking to?” This would be my mother’s voice, sounding like it did when I was a fourteen, trying to have a private phone conversation with a boy.
“No one.”
“Well tell no one it’s time for you to finish your homework.”
Please God, make my foot better and I promise I will be a much kinder, less smug person.
At this point, I had been living the life of a cripple for over six months. I know “cripple” is a word now deemed offensive by the general public, and I can easily go along with that for other people. But in my case I didn’t feel “physically challenged” or “differently abled.” I felt like a clip-clopping nag who should be put out of her misery.
My only pair of shoes that offered a modicum of relief were heavy-soled slip-ons with a Mary Jane strap. They were cute, because why would I own ugly shoes, but hardly meant to accommodate everything from skirts to pajama pants.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Dr. Podiatry asked me during my second appointment, “What is your pain level today?”
“Eleven.”
“Okay then,” he said, “Now hop on this treadmill and let’s see how you do.”
Before he could fit me for my orthotics, Dr. Podiatry needed to videotape my footfalls to further evaluate my problem. I limped barefoot on the treadmill for a few minutes while he and I watched the big monitor that showed me walking from the back.
Please God, make it true that the camera adds ten pounds.
After I returned to the examining table, Dr. Podiatry sat across from me and explained the situation. I had compensatory hyperpronation, or too much inward rotation of the foot. The ideal motion of the foot is neutral pronation. Two degrees off strains the ligament. Five degrees off results in severe pain. Seventeen degrees off (me) makes you a plantar fasciitis time bomb. Because I was “slim and trim,” the onset of symptoms had been delayed. Dr. Podiatry also showed me X-rays of my feet, revealing heel spurs, or bony outgrowths, on both my calcaneus bones.
To summarize the most useful information I took away from this appointment: Dr. Podiatry thought I was slim and trim!
Please God, let the custom orthotics I have just ordered work miracles, and I won’t even complain about the $378 price tag.
Depression
My feet were shattered. My situation was hopeless. Or so it seemed. A mere seven months ago I was living the dream of any able-bodied, middle-aged woman who had managed to convince herself that fifty was the new thirty. But then, just like that, I had become the star of my own Lifeline commercial.
“What are you looking for?” Steve asked me one night as he sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes. It was two in the morning. I was on my hands and knees on the floor. Naturally, the Light Sleeper had woken up, even though I had purposely made a point not to wear my clip-cloppy shoes.
“I’m not looking for anything,” I snapped. “I’m crawling to the bathroom.”
While I waited for the arrival of my custom orthotics, a shroud of defeat settled over me. Inserts for my shoes? How were two little molded pieces of plastic going to restore me to my former self?
On one level, I understood that millions of people faced greater physical challenges than plantar fasciitis, or even disgusting warty toes. I also realized that, if it was true that God only gave us as much as we could handle, He must have set the bar pretty low for me. Still, after so many years of being able to move around without pain, I felt entitled to good feet, if only because I had always enjoyed them.
Way back when, the physical therapists who first treated me had sent me home with handouts describing all the stretching exercises that were supposed to put a stop to all this nonsense. I had dangled my heels off steps, rolled frozen Pepsi bottles under my arches, and written the alphabet in the air with my feet. But my condition had only worsened, bringing me to the point where the pain in my left heel now had spread to my other foot, up my Achilles tendons, and into my calves. I imagined my body as a storm-tracking map, the dark swirls around my lower extremity rapidly moving in a no
rtherly direction.
I stopped doing physical therapy.
I stopped exercising.
I pretty much stopped moving at all.
“I’m home,” my children would call from the foyer after returning from their days at school. From my spot on the chaise lounge in the bedroom, I could hear the clunk of backpacks and the kicking off of boots.
“I’m upstairs,” I’d call down, my lap covered with a blanket. It was amazing how much colder the long winter seemed when one simply reclined all day.
My body felt like it was petrifying.
Where had I seen this kind of deterioration before? Ah yes, my mother. One Christmas she had come to visit us in Vermont, looking fairly hearty. A week after she returned home she fell down two steps and dislocated her shoulder. It “froze” during the healing process, and the rest of her body quickly followed suit. Within a year, my mom was confined to her recliner, unable to press the channel arrow on her remote control without assistance.
“It was just two steps!” my family decried to her doctors. “It was just a dislocated shoulder. How could this happen so fast?”
“It just does sometimes, when a person gets old.”
Acceptance
My orthotics arrived in February, eight months after that first painful step. As long as I inserted them in whatever shoes I was wearing I could walk normally, and even jog without feeling a twinge. Still, the experience made me attuned to other creeping aches and inconveniences—a stiffness in my bones, an inexplicable bruise on my arm, the occasional problem with word retrieval. Here were the nuances of aging I had neither noticed nor previously acknowledged.
If I could not fight the inevitable, I thought, I might as well prepare for it. Or so I tried to tell myself, but acceptance had never been my strong suit. This lacking came into relief when I saw a photograph in the newspaper of a smiling woman who had lost her leg in an accident when she was hit by a car a few years ago. What struck me was how she was in her wheelchair, shoveling her driveway after a winter storm. “I’m game,” she was quoted as saying. “I love the snow.”
Seeing how this woman remained so positive and full of energy, even in challenging circumstances, all I could think was, You have got to be kidding!
Before my foot problems, I honestly could not conceive of my own death. This isn’t to imply that I didn’t have moments when I thought I was going to die, say when the car I was driving skidded out of control, or I choked on a lump of cheese fondue. But those were instances of panic at the prospect of horrible suffering, not about the reality that one day I would be gone. Not gone as in off to the store. But gone gone.
Despite the fact I am a writer, I have never enjoyed a good memory. I am bad at recalling people’s faces or names. My family has had to remind me of entire vacations. I barely remember my childhood. That’s why it has always struck me how clearly I recall the first time I met Steve. I can still see the snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his parka when he walked into the bar. The first words we exchanged remain as clear as dialogue on a page. I can feel my fingers stiffening as we stood outside in the cold, and I wrote my number on a matchbook.
This sort of recall may not be unusual for other people, or perhaps even for me if I had known then what I know now, that this would be the man I would marry over twenty-five years ago. But that night Steve was just another cute guy in a bar; it was just another snowy night in the city. Given my normal state of inattention, this memory imprinted in my mind to serve as a kind of demarcation. Now—this moment—is the beginning of your future.
In a strange way, I believe the same is true about that morning when I first felt the pain in my left foot. Since then, I am sure I have forgotten much worthier memories, yet I can bring back that morning in full sensory detail—sitting up in bed, my foot making contact with the floorboard, the sharp stab in my heel, falling back on the dog.
This moment, too, feels like a demarcation, the beginning of my future as a mere mortal. I know I have held off that reality longer than most people my age, thanks to my smug genes and, no doubt, my preternatural talent for ignoring mini traumas.
Once in a while I will bounce on my heels, just to do a quick check for pain. So far, so good, I reassure myself, but now I can see it and feel it. My body is wearing down. I am not old yet, but I am aging. Yes, my orthotics are two tough pieces of plastic, but even they can’t stave off the relentless pressure of time.
How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier
Months had passed since I had accepted an invitation to speak at a conference for writing teachers, and now it had come down to this. I needed to get up at 4 a.m. to figure out what I was going to say. The conference was this morning, and I had to be prepared and presentable in exactly four hours.
Downstairs, I pushed the button on the coffeemaker and sat in front of my computer. How to Help Students Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, I typed. This was the title of the talk I had submitted to the conference organizers, though now I wondered, too late: Was that heading even grammatically correct? Given my audience of former English majors, I would find out soon enough.
No point in trying to think without an infusion of caffeine. I drank a couple cups of coffee while checking Facebook, Twitter, and the Amazon ranking for my book on writing that I’d be hawking at the conference. At the moment, my ranking was 294,333, which meant that—of all the books listed on Amazon—294,332 of them were outselling mine. I toyed with the idea of ordering a copy of my own book, which experience has taught me temporarily boosts its ranking by several thousand points, but this was getting costly, not to mention pathetic.
Time to buckle down. Eventually, I typed a sentence. Then deleted it. I typed another sentence. Backspace, backspace, backspace. My shoulders hunched. Was I getting a headache? My throat felt tender. Maybe I should call, better yet email, the conference organizers and tell them I was sick.
Instead, I checked the morning headlines on MSNBC. com. The stock market . . . blah. Politics . . . Blah. Wait! What was this? The 10 Sexiest Women over 40!
I clicked the link. Jennifer Aniston . . . Vanessa Williams . . . some blond sports commentator I didn’t recognize. The commentator wasn’t nearly as pretty as the other over-forties; clearly the judges had just thrown her in as a token non-actress. In fact, I thought, I look as good as her, but just to be sure, I decided to do a quick check in the mirror.
My lord! No wonder I couldn’t concentrate. Who could write with a face this tired? I tiptoed upstairs and retrieved my makeup bag from the master bathroom. While I was at it, I grabbed a handful of beauty products from a bottom drawer—bronzer, lip plumper, glitter-blue eye shadow. These were items I had bought on impulse over the years but rarely, if ever, used.
“What are you doing?” the Light Sleeper, mumbled from our bed. I had dropped the eyelash curler on my way to the stairs.
“I’m working,” I snapped. “Go back to sleep.” What did a person have to do around here to get a little quiet time to write?
By the time I finished my beauty makeover, and started a load of wash, the clock on my computer read 5:56 a.m. What had happened to the last two hours?
How to Help Students Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier. I stared at the screen. Not a single idea came to mind. Plus, it didn’t help that now I was over-caffeinated, my eyelids felt glittery, and my lips were swollen from the plumper that had come with a page of consumer warnings.
To settle myself down, I decided to reread an article I had recently sold to The Writer magazine. That was coherent, I thought, prompting me to reread some of my published essays, and then my more entertaining “sent” emails. Clearly, I used to be able to write, I reasoned. And if I did it before, I could do it again!
But first I needed to pee.
In the downstairs bathroom, I couldn’t help but notice that the water in the toilet bowl was rippling. While this was more perplexing than worrisome, I hesitated to sit down, recalling stories of alligators in the sewers tha
t occasionally swim up into people’s toilets. Could there be a more humiliating way to die, I reflected, than to be eaten by an alligator while sitting on the toilet?
A clunking sounded through the wall. The bathroom floor started to shake, and the water in the toilet bowl rippled more discernibly. Oh, I caught on. Our wash machine in the adjoining laundry room—off balance for months—must have entered its final spin cycle. But hadn’t I just started that load?
Back at the computer, the clock read 6:41 a.m. That left just one hour and nineteen minutes to write my talk, take a shower, and be on the road.
Steve came into the room, handing me a plate of toast.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“I haven’t written a word,” I glared. “I’m doomed.”
“You’ll think of something,” he said. “You always do.”
How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier. When my own workshop participants are stuck, I give them a writing prompt to help them get started. Sometimes I tell them simply to start with a list.
“One,” I typed, “Appreciate the value of bad writing. At least it’s better than a blank page.” Oh puh-leeze, I thought, but made myself push on.
“Two . . .” An email for a male enhancement product popped onto my screen. I pressed delete, but it occurred to me: What if someone invented a real male enhancement product, but then no one would believe them because of all the spammers and pervs?