8 September 1999
I have three phone calls to make today. The first is to Carl, the "Customer Service " guy for the company that built our house. Yesterday we dropped off a key to our house and a list of maintenance issues with the realtor at the model house. I want to make sure that Carl got both the key and the list. I'm not saying that we don't trust the realtor to have given it to him, but... Okay, I am saying we don't trust the realtor.

The second call is to the plumber for our house. Our showers have a safety block in them that keeps us from getting the water too hot. That's all well and good, but I like hot showers, and the water coming out of our tub is barely lukewarm. Ideally, I want the safety block removed. We don't have any little kids, and college-educated adults are presumeably intelligent enough to adjust their own water temperature.

The third call is to my podiatrist. I suffer from a condition called plantar fascitis, which is to say the fascia (which is similar to a tendon, only it connects muscle to bone rather than bone to bone) that connects my heel to my toes is overstretched and coming unattached at the heel. I have it in both feet. Sounds painful, doesn't it? When I was in graduate school, I went through a lot of treatments for it - cortisone shots, six weeks in a cast, even minor surgery. Nothing fixed the problem for more than a few weeks at a time. For the last couple of years, it's been more of an annoyance than anything else - I have to stretch my calf muscles every morning (they take up the slack for the overstretched fascia) and I feel a little stiff for the first hour or so of the day, but once I get warmed up, I'm generally all right. If I spend more than an hour or so on my feet I'm likely to be extra sore for a few days or a week afterward, but it's manageable. But since the move, I've been getting shooting pains in the back of my right heel, which is new. (The pain usually hits in my arches.) I think the problem is that I have to get out of bed and go straight down the stairs (to feed the cat) and the extra stretch of going down the stairs is straining things. This morning the usual stretches hurt my heel before I felt the stretch in my calf, which can't be good. So it's time to see if there's anything else my foot doctor can do for me.

Also, I want him to look at my perpetual ingrown toenail again - I wear orthopedic arch supports in my shoes all the time because of the fascitis, and it pushes my feet a little higher and further forward in my shoes than they're really meant to be, which has resulted in an ingrown toenail. It doesn't usually get infected, thank goodness, but it's always a little sore, and for whatever reason that's the toe that I'm always stubbing. The usual treatment for ingrown toenails is to pack cotton behind them, which does two things: It encourages the nail to grow out away from the toe (sortof like tying a tree into the position you want it to grow), and it places a soft barrier between the sharp edge of the nail and the irritated flesh, which allows the flesh to heal. If you ever get ingrown toenails, I highly recommend this treatment - do it right after a good hot shower, so the nail is as soft as it's likely to get, then tear a tiny wad of cotton from a cotton ball or Q-tip and pack it (I use a pointed nail file sterilized with alcohol to do the packing) as far behind the ingrown bit as possible. Change the cotton once or twice a day, but don't go without it except in the shower for about a week. You'll feel this weird pressure when you walk, but most of the time, it reduces the pain almost immediately, and the toe heals in a few days. Except with this perpetual ingrown nail I've got - the cotton trick works for about a week, and then it starts hurting again. I may have to have the nail surgically narrowed. What fun. At least I'm not worried about what my feet will look like - all feet are ugly.

My wrist is hurting again, too, which hasn't been a problem for five or six years. The last time I had a problem with it, the doctor couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. I had x-rays taken to see if there was a spur or a hairline fracture, I was tested for arthritis, I was given special exercises to do... Nothing worked, and there didn't seem to be any actual problems. It just happened that if I moved my wrist wrong, or too fast, or sometimes with no reason at all, I would feel shooting pains. No one could figure out why. About halfway through my junior year of college, it went away, and I thought maybe it had been the last of my growing pains or something, and forgot about it. But now it's back. I should have it checked again - this time I'm concerned that it's carpal tunnel - but it's just going to have to wait in an ace bandage until I get my feet taken care of.

Boy, am I pathetic today, or what?