I broke my foot.  I’m not exactly sure when.  I know I either broke it or re-injured it in February, but I think the original problem was sometime around a year ago.  I definitively got it diagnosed as broken in June from x-rays.  It had never swollen up or hurt all the time — it was one of those annoying sometimes painful sometimes not kind of things with the fifth metatarsal of my right foot.

It wasn’t anything like the time I broke the fifth metatarsal of my left foot when I was ten and playing basketball.  That was obviously broken  — hugely swollen and painful.  I was two blocks from home and thankful I had my bike with me — I don’t think I could have walked the two blocks.  This time, I knew in my heart is was broken — or at least cracked, but it never did swell up, and I could walk on it fairly well by the next day.  So, I waited until my annual doctor appointment at the VA, where I planned to ask for a consult to podiatry to get new orthotics fitted for my feet.  I mentioned I thought I’d broken my foot, so my primary care monitor ordered x-rays.  I went to the podiatry appointment, and I was mildly surprised to get confirmation from the x-ray that I had, indeed, broken my foot.  The podiatrist agreed it could be a tricky healer, because the only real way to get them to heal quickly is to stay off them, but nobody can really do that.  He said if it continued to bother me to let him know, and he’d get me a bone growth stimulator.

He described how it worked, and I said I’d consider it.  I did a little research, and the foot still nagged at me once in awhile.  I began to think I might be favoring it a little, and that might be negatively impacting my right knee, which had also been bothering me a lot more lately.  I called and requested the stimulator, so they set me up with an appointment and issued me a walking boot to wear for the first month of treatment.

I got the Exogen Ultrasound Bone Healing System on September 2.  You strap it onto the site of the break for 20 minutes a day.  It’s simple, and you don’t feel it working.  I wore the boot for the first 30 days, then I switched back to regular shoes.  I’m continuing the Exogen treatments.

My follow-up appointment was this morning, and I had a different podiatrist (a new resident, maybe?), and this one was more personable than the last.  He confirmed via comparison from the last x-ray to this morning’s x-ray that the bone is healing.  The treatment runs from 90 days to 7 months, so they’ll be scheduling my 90 day follow up for early December, and he thinks the bone will be fine by then.

He answered a couple of questions I had related to my feet, and one was simple, but his answer was amusing.  I have one toenail causing problems.  I asked him about it and said, “I’m trimming them even across like I’ve heard you’re supposed to do.”  He said, I don’t know who came up with that advice, but they make me a lot of money.  He says to cut toenails to conform to the shape of the toe. I pass that suggestion along just in case anyone else is dealing with an annoying toenail.