How my foot looks

Until Thursday afternoon, I'd been permitted only occasional glimpses of my injured foot. Between casts, while wheeling from podiatry clinic to X-ray, I stared and on occasion touched the strange flesh that had once been part of me but now belonged to doctors and nurses and technicians—and to that same category of existence that lodged many of my life's unpleasantnesses, and which was understood to fall outside of The Meaningful, The Useful, The Relevant.

Now the foot and the leg attached to it are naked, and though they are far from perfect, their care and improvement have been left to me and to an occasional black boot, no longer to a bent plaster tube.

This is not my foot as I remember it. The skin is dry, peeling, wrinkled, splotchy. The area around my ankle is swollen and I don't recall that freckle. There is a cut along the left side of my heel, with tape strips crossing it. Some dried blood. Much of the skin is shiny; what isn't tends to ruddiness. I can wiggle my toes and rotate my foot, but I don't do much of the rotating because it hurts a little.

The leg, too, is foreign. Bruises streak and stripe it, and I did not know that bruises came in such colors. Much yellow, some purple. The calf muscle is gelatinous, unsightly.

Lots of skin is flaking and sloughing from the toes and between them. I've been leaving the cut alone, but I suspect that while I sleep the cat or I may try to lick it. Maybe it tastes metallic, or maybe it's like licking a battery.

My heel

On July 25 I broke my heel bone. Since that time I've been unable to set any weight on my left leg, which has changed things for me. For instance, here's how I get my mail. I put on my knapsack and crutch my way to the mailbox. I then lean my crutches against the fence, balance on my right leg, and unlock the mailbox, hanging onto it for extra balance. I then struggle out of my knapsack, unzip it, and use my right hand to hold the knapsack while using my left to stuff mail in, all the while wobbling quite a bit. I then zip closed the bag, shoulder it, close and lock the mailbox, and lift my crutches from the fence. Soon I'm back inside--unless I'm so tired by all this that I make it no further than the chair on the back porch--and I set my crutches against something and allow myself to fall onto the floor. I love the floor.

The furthest I've walked since my injury is around the block. I've done that three times. Mostly I just sit inside or, better, lie on the floor, listening to Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart's piano concertos. Which is not all that different from how I spent my time before my injury. Except now I don't even walk to the grocery store, the prospect of which makes me anxious. I may try tomorrow.

I was misdiagnosed. My ankle was terrifically swollen and the nurse who looked at the first x-rays concluded that I must have strained a ligament since the ankle was not broken. She missed the line running through my calcaneus. So I went home. Later I had to visit the San Rafael emergency room to get a cast put on. That was July 26.

On July 31 Jack Schuberth opened my heel, aligned the odds and ends that had once been my calcaneus, and drove four metal screws through them, an especially long one from the back of my heel up at a forty-five-degree angle, the three others at a right angle to that. I think I now have some titanium in my left foot, but I keep forgetting to ask Jack what sort of metal he chose.

The operation left me with a nasty case of contact dermatitis all over my back and sides, but I've had no pain and have consumed none of the vicodin I was issued early on.