Right Foot

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I have repressed memories, so I probably won't EVER remember everything, or so I can hope. This "foot story" is ending with the conclusion that my father's stomping caused it, but because of the repressed memories I will never know if something more traumatic happened to cause it.

 

My father was unnecessarily and consistently cruel.

 

I remember him forcing our big doberman dog to lay on a baby blanket and if the dog's paws came off, even if while sleeping, he would sometimes just go stomp on the dog's foot. It learned to stay in a ball on that little blanket.

 

I also have flashbacks of him stomping on my foot, and it was something I thought my writer's mind conjured - influenced by witnessing the same thing happen to the dog.

Then I became so angry at a boyfriend in 1993, that I kicked a wall out of anger and couldn't walk on the foot for a week. 

 

I went to the ER, they did a normal Xray - saw nothing and sent me home with pain meds. A month later I still cannot put pressure on it, and so they do a more in-depth x-ray.

 

This time they say they see two fractures in the top of my foot, the hard bony part, and they say that they look to be from two separate incidents, yet both during toddler years. They tell me that the breaks are so healed incorrectly that they cannot be re-broken in order to to heal correctly as they would in other cases.

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All of a sudden it clicked in my head, why I limped as a child. I limped so bad that I clearly remember extreme ridicule and shame at a family picnic, walking across my backyard and my father saying "Judy is so weak that it hurts her to walk on grass."

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I will never know, did he realize his stomping broke my foot or did he really just think I was that "weak" to begin with?

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Later I remembered the MANY nights of severe cramping as a child, so bad that it would keep me up at night and my parents would tell me I was suffering from "growing pains."

 

I do remember asking other kids about it, and them telling me they didn't have them. My parents just explained that some people get growing pains and some people don't.

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Other A-HA moments STILL occur, such as a couple months ago when I remembered trying out for track and being able to run real fast, but then my foot would cramp up and I would just STOP. 

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I remember the coach and my classmates screaming, DON'T STOP! KEEP GOING! Yada yada, but I could not and I would feel so bad that they thought I was too lazy to do it, yet I had no idea my foot was broken, injured.

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When I had a nerve conduction study they diagnosed many things in me, including "tarsal tunnel" in my foot. I told the DR about the 2 mis-healed breaks in the foot, but he still said I have the equivalent of carpal tunnel, but in my foot.

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I also told him about walking 9 1/2 miles one time when my friend was taking me to her father & sister's house, because I was homeless. It was a sleet-filled snowy day and we walked on the side of the highway, stopping for her to wrap my toes in toilet paper at a gas station because the foot of my boot was cracked and the cold wet sucked in with every damned step.

 

It just seems to me that the prolonged exposure, that turned my toes blue, would have had long-lasting consequences and I THINK it's a factor in this supposed "tarsal tunnel" crap.

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This in itself fuels my belief that undiagnosed injuries that have healed improperly in growing children IS A FACTOR if not A CAUSE in some of the "unknown cause" diseases like fibromyalgia.

 

Not only will the broken bones cause the pain, but then the "fight or flight" chemicals that the bodies produce when in fear also would go hand in hand since any incident of an adult breaking a child's bones would be labeled as traumatic.

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Next... Fibromyalgia

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