Unwalkable

I just want to vent about my feet.

This morning I dug my Birkenstocks out of storage for the first time this season; if you’re not familiar with that brand, they have molded footbeds that are supposed to make them more comfortable, or provide better arch support, or whatever. This means that they take some getting used to every year – the first few times you walk in them, they absolutely kill your arches, or at least they do mine. So I was expecting my feet to hurt after a while today; it started to hit while we were doing some grocery shopping. It was pretty bad but I managed to keep going.

It wasn’t until we were visiting my in-laws much later in the day (telling them about our trip to Alaska) that I realized the Birkenstocks weren’t the only problem. I woke up this morning with absolutely terrible hives – I have got to call Dr. Kaplan‘s office and make another appointment, I haven’t seen him in over five years. I took some prednisone this morning and the hives are doing better now, but the angioedema associated with a bad hive breakout was making my feet painful. Before I saw Dr. Kaplan in April 2002, this was a regular occurrence for me – there were many, many months where I was non-functional due to the hives and angioedema. I could barely walk sometimes, and there were days when I could barely get out of bed. Angioedema is swelling of the entire extremity, which means the skin stretches and the whole thing is painful to walk on – it’s not just a matter of favoring an ankle or something, it’s more like any time you touch your foot down, it hurts like hell.

When it was getting near time to leave, I stood up and I almost couldn’t bear the pain. :A: was chatting with her parents a little bit more and I said through clenched teeth, “sweetie can we go NOW please?” They all came over to look and they were shocked by my feet…apparently they were more swollen than I realized; :A: said they looked like “angry red sausages.” By hobbling on the outer sides of my feet, and leaning on :A:, I was able to get out to the car, and I made it into our house and crawled up the stairs to the bedroom. (I was out of breath and my heart was pounding after the effort of walking inside.) :A: nuked a TV dinner and brought it to me, and brought me pillows; I’ve had my feet elevated for several hours now and for a couple of hours I’ve had ice packs on my feet too because the swelling isn’t going down. Getting up to go to the bathroom has been a major event because I have to hobble over there. This sucks.