Getting the boot

After spending the last several weeks trying to convince myself that the pain in my foot is

“No big deal”

I realized that six weeks of pain and 3 weeks of not being able to run is a big deal and it was time to do something about it. So I headed to the Dr. to get it checked out. At the first appointment, we ran through all of the symptoms and everything pointed to a stress fracture, even though the x-rays didn’t show anything. But, after some Google sleuthing, I came to find out that many times metatarsal stress fractures do’t show up on x-rays. At that point we decided that we would take a conservative path and give my foot a couple of more weeks of no running and substitute in non-impact exercise (cycling) and see what happens. If it cleared up it would be a success, if not we would move on to Plan B.

Three weeks later, nothing really changed and when I went back to the Dr. decided it was time to move on to Plan B, a more active course to figure out what was wrong. Everything stills seems to point to a stress fracture, but nothing is definitive and we are going to treat it as one anyway while we take the steps for a confirmed diagnosis of the problem. The main thing now will be to place my foot in a walking boot to take the stress off of my foot. Even if is not a fracture and only some lesser type of injury, the boot would still be part of the treatment plan.

So I set up an MRI for Wednesday (3 days from today) and will follow-up with the Dr. two days later. At that point, I should know for sure what is causing my problem.

And just before it was time to leave, I got my boot. It doesn’t quite match Luke’s since he has a high boot and I have a low one. But nonetheless we are “BOOT Buddies”.