Pain, a Limp and Winkle Picker’s Disease

Doctors who treat themselves may have fools for patients, but they look like geniuses compared with a reporter who tried to diagnose herself via the Internet.

It seemed so simple. I Googled “foot pain,” and up came two sites with neat little pictures of feet, arrows pointing to various parts and instructions to “click where it hurts.” I clicked and, voila! both sites said my pain — on the top and side of the foot, around the big toe — was probably from a bunion or gout.
Gout? Hmmph. What came to mind was Henry VIII, the movie version, hugely fat and grotesque on his throne, bellowing about his toe. As for bunions, weren’t they from pointy shoes, high heels, a family history? I had none of those. This wasn’t quite adding up.

Onward I clicked. I took fleeting comfort from a slide slow of hideous foot diseases that I clearly didn’t have. Lists of other ailments didn’t match, either. I don’t have diabetes or flat feet and I hadn’t injured myself. One site mentioned leprosy, which had drama but seemed unlikely. I was baffled.

A podiatrist, recommended by a doctor friend, took about 37 seconds to figure out what was wrong. He shoved my big toe up and down, gave it a squeeze that made me shriek and said smugly, “We’ll take some X-rays, and I’ll show you what’s causing your pain.”

A few minutes later, there it was on his computer screen: a bone spur, sticking up like a tiny, evil spike where the big toe joins the rest of the foot. The cause was arthritis of the big toe, which sounds ridiculous even to me. But it’s real, a wearing out of the cartilage that normally protects the bones from rubbing against each other. I’ve always walked a fair amount — at least three miles a day, often twice that or more in recent years — and at 56, I guess it’s catching up with me. Without realizing it, I’ve been wearing out my feet.  

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