Posted January 25th, 2004 by Michelle

I’m doing that thing I do again, that thing where all I want to do is hang out by myself. It doesn’t help that I’m struggling to gain at least a partial state of health, and for some reason the way I think I’m going to get healthy is to spend lots of time alone staring into space. I mean, it’s working a little bit, but I have to careful about isolating too much.

I’ve been very sick off and on since I moved here to Napa Valley, and we have finally discovered the cause: my room. I can’t name all of the bad stuff that is floating around down in what is essentially the basement of the house, but the guy who tested them said they weren’t “toxic” but that some of them were “very elevated”. Which is good news. If they had been toxic, I’d be dead. Instead, I’m just constantly sick, and the only time I felt good was when I went back to New York for a week. I’m on a number of drugs to combat the icky stuff that is running rampant in my respiratory system and I feel rather far from being actually well.

I also finally went to the podiatrist who listened to my story of foot pain woe for about thirty seconds before sending me straight to x-ray. The good news is I don’t have heel spurs, I just have rather severe Plantar Fasciitis. She said that one cortisone treatment would bring down the inflammation and ultimately make me better.

I thought, Super! A couple of pills and I’ll feel great! But I was clearly deluding myself. She said, “I’ll go get the injections” and my heart jumped into my throat. I’m not sure if I’ve detailed on this blog my phobia of needles. It’s not that I hate them, or hate being near them. I don’t mind at all when they are pointed to enter someone else’s flesh. It’s when I think about them entering my own skin that I get woozy. It took my doctor about five minutes to get the shots ready during which time I tried to talk myself out of passing out. When she returned, I told her that if I fainted, just to let my lie there until I came around. She said, “Aren’t you an EMT?” I smiled weakly, unable to explain, and tried to prepare myself for what was about to happen.

She swabbed the side of my foot, the fleshy part between the sole and the heel, and produced a very thin but way too long needle. It HURT. Each shot took easily about five hours to shove into the meat of my poor, aching feet, and I tried not to hyperventilate because of the pain. Before she started, and after hearing about my little fainting problem, she pulled a screen in front of me, but because of the angle of my chair, I had a perfect view of each needle plunging into my skin. When it was all over, I laid back and said, “I’ll be right back”. But I didn’t faint. I just felt woozy and barfy for about five minutes, at which time the receptionist, who was told to check on me, stuck her head in the door and flashed her shiny braces at me. “Ya’ll right?” “Yeah. Be right out.”

She said that the pain should start feeling better immediately, but that I needed to stay off my feet for a good week. No tennis, no running, not even major walking. But that was Thursday, and right now, Sunday morning, my feet hurt as much as ever. I’m going to have to call her in the morning and find out if they will ever actually stop hurting.

Maybe I haven’t actually wanted to be well. Maybe it’s a crutch I’ve used for a solid year, starting with hemorrhoids, going to my cervical cancer scare, to my plantar issues, to my infected respiratory system. Maybe I’ve used my illnesses to explain why I’m not currently in Africa. I don’t know. But I’ve finally reached a point where I’m just done with this. I want to be well, I want to get back into shape, and I want my 31-year-old body to start acting like one rather than a diseased body three times my age.