oh, to walk again

Thanks to my plantar fasciitis, I haven't walked since November 6th, the day I did a very painful 20K walk to my friend Dr. Jeff's residence. I realize that plantar fasciitis is my own self-diagnosis, but the pain I'd been experiencing has been exactly consistent with the descriptions of the condition that I'd read. Pain starts at the heel, then radiates forward along the sole. Yup, that's me. Anyway, those same sources said that healing—assuming you're not getting surgery—takes 8-12 weeks, so I've avoided distance walking. A side effect of not walking is that I have more free time to blog, but this has not translated into getting my movie-review book done. So, I'm feeling lazy and increasingly bloated, like a retired football player gone to seed. I want to get back on the paths again, but that won't happen until about mid-January. I may start with a tentative walk down to Bundang since that's only 18K—short by the standards of serious distance walking. We'll see. Expect more updates soon.

Almost forgot: it's my left foot that has the plantar fasciitis. My right foot's big toe (still haven't seen a doc) continues to have a gaping hole that, I'm pretty convinced, leads down to an abscess. I looked up "diabetic abscess" on YouTube, and those pics are horrifying. My foot's tiny little spider hole is nothing by comparison; I keep it clean and well irrigated, and there's been no infection thus far (redness, heat, swelling, etc.). I do keep expecting an earthworm to come crawling out of it, though. That might almost be nifty: Hello, neighbor. The big toe doesn't hurt, maybe thanks to diabetic numbness (which, as with the numbness associated with leprosy, can be dangerous when you don't know you have an open wound), so I can walk on it, and even with the little walking I've done, a callus has formed around the hole. I wish I could fill the hole with some medical material that would eventually merge with my body, but I don't think such a thing has been invented yet. Right now, the paradox is that, every time I clean out the hole, I disinfect it, but because my cleaning sessions make the hole bleed anew, I may be preventing the thing from healing. So I'm kind of trapped in this vicious circle.

That won't prevent me from walking come mid-January, though. I've developed a system to deal with the leaky toe; it's not perfect, but it gets me through the day. In a couple weeks, then, I'll be back on the paths and, I hope, on my way to re-losing a lot of weight.