Reflections in the Dragon's Eye: A Journal

19 December 2000

Ouch. I was pretty sure I was fine to come to work yesterday. I came to work. I stayed seated as much as possible, and took my Advil every four hours. At 2:30, I was called into a meeting down at the main office, which is at least half a block away. (We have got to get some more compact office space.) I thought about not going to the meeting, but this meeting was going to throw a lot of issues on the table that I've been trying to bring to the managers' attention for over a month, and I really needed to be there to present my side of them, or I was going to get screwed over.

So I limped down to the main conference room. The meeting wound up taking over two hours, and while professionally I'm glad I went, personally... My Advil ran out about half an hour into the meeting, and the walk really strained me a little more than I was ready for. Today my foot aches and I'm getting twinges of pain in my heel despite the four Advil. Some of that may be due to my taking a hot shower this morning - heat is bad for healing cuts. But I think more of it has to do with the walking I did yesterday.

So instead of fighting Matt's insistence that I do nothing, we made a quorum, and today I'm taking it easy. I've got a chair in my office dragged up to my desk so I can keep my foot up, and I have no intention of leaving this chair more than four times today. (The four I've allotted myself are to prepare breakfast, to prepare lunch, for a bathroom break, and to go home.) Luckily, the meeting I'd had planned for today was moved to tomorrow. (But I'd scheduled it for my office anyway.)

I've had questions about the nature of my problem and the surgery, so when I was at the doctor's office, I requested a copy of my x-rays.

A fascia is the same kind of tissue as tendon - long, stringy fibers with the job of tying things together. A tendon ties one muscle to another. A fascia attaches muscle to bone. There's a fascia that runs from the base of the heel up to the ball of your foot, called the plantar fascia. It pretty much forms the arch of your foot.

Both of my plantar fascia are too short. (The condition is called fascitis.) As a result, when I put a lot of pressure on them - heavy activity, or even just a lot of mild activity - the strands that make up the fascia get exhausted, and some of them snap. This generally happens near the heel, where most of the strain is. As you might imagine, this is more than a little bit painful. Because a warmed and stretched calf muscle can take up some of the fascia's slack, the pain is at its worst in the morning, before my calves have been warmed up and stretched.

So for approximately the past seven years, I haven't been able to get out of bed and walk normally. For about the first half hour of the day, I shuffle slowly and take stairs one step at a time. If I've done a lot of walking or any amount of running recently, it will still hurt to walk after my calves have stretched out, because the fascia tissue will have been damaged.

Over time, as the fascia continues to pull away from the heel, the heel bone will grow out in an attempt to take up the slack. This sounds like a reasonable reaction, but bone spurs cause their own special problems. (You can see the beginnings of my bone spur in the x-ray detail.)

Thus, the surgery: a fasciotomy. The doctor cut a small hole in the bottom of my foot, and then deliberately cut about half the fascia strands. This is cleaner and less painful than having them break, and the hope is that enough of them have been cut that the entire fascia can retract a little, and re-attach itself a little further up the heel.

I had similar surgery done on my left foot six years ago, and once the scarring complications had been resolved, the result was about a 75% reduction in pain. I'm hoping to achieve as much or more with this surgery. That much of a reduction in pain will mean I might be able to have a near-normal activity level with only basic precautions on my part.

Or, put another way: I won't have to weigh the consequenses every time I want to go for a walk.

Word of the Day: quorum - a select group; the number (as a majority) of a group that when assembled is legally competent to transact business

Store prohibits window shoppers

-- A Japanese store owner allegedly forced a female shopper to get on her knees and apologize for eye-balling a coat she didn't want to buy.

The frustrated owner had previously hung a sign reading, "Entry strictly prohibited to shoplifters, browsers, and teasers."

Previous Reflection

Current Reflections

Reflect Back

Next Reflection