Another whinge - and another one not for the faint hearted

At the risk of sounding like I'm a whinger who talks way to much about feet, I'm going to give you another whinging post about feet.

I'm wandering around today with no shoes on. Despite what some of you may remember from my uni days, this is not due to any hippie idealism. It's because my toe hurts.

I have this hereditary weird toe thing. My siblings all have the same thing and it seems to be inherited from our Dad. In our family it's a well known phenomenon. Basically, our big toes are larger than the rest of our toes. Not just in the normal way where big toes are supposed to be bigger than the rest (as the name would suggest), but substantially bigger. I'd guess mine is more than double the size of my next largest toe. Given that I've already posted one gross foot photo on this blog, I'll spare you a visual, but you get the picture. If you're really curious, you can check the archives. Otherwise, just take my word for it. Where most people have a big toe (or two), our family have giant toes.

Now the giant toes on their own are really not the problem. Aside from looking a bit odd, and meaning that we all have to wear a size bigger shoe than the rest of our foot would require, having an inordinately large big toes doesn't cause any problems on its own. The problem is that our toenails are also inordinately big. And not just big in that they are relative to the toe and therefore cover the inordinately big toe. (who would have thought you could use the word "inordinately 4 times in one paragraph?). The big toenails are both large in surface area, but also in thickness and strength. In fact, they kind of resemble a (barely) smaller version of a horses hoof. Very difficult to cut and prone to things like ingrown toenails. They tend to be OK during summer when open-toed shoes are essential wardrobe items, but not so much fun in winter when they get crammed into open-toed shoes.

So anyway, I'll try getting to the point at some stage here (I'm sure I had one when I started this rant....Hmm....Oh yes. Right.) Well my toes have been hurting quite a lot lately. To the point where it was not overly pleasant wearing socks and even worse wearing stocking, and downright torture wearing tight shoes.

Being a girl, and therefore definitely not too tough to go see a doctor, I toddled off to my GP and got a referral to a Podiatrist. I've never been to a podiatrist before and didn't quite know what to expect. But this one was conveniently located and managed to fit me in with only a couple of days wait - a nice change from most specialists.

So I rocked up and was pleasantly surprised. She was professional and did a great job and knew what was wrong immediately and took care of it straight away. (Corns, if you must know). Plus she had one of those machines that magically process your health insurance card so you don't have to pay and then fill out forms and make a claim and pray to the arbitrary gods of health insurance that you'll get a decent refund.

So all was well and good for a while, and since my podiatrist included a complete once-over for my feet and heels in my visit, my feet looked better than they ever have in my whole life.

Unfortunately all is again not well in footsville. Compounded by the fact that I wore my least comfortable pair of work shoes today (they look great with the outfit - it's not like I could have worn my brown boots with my black and white outfit) that get kind of sore by the end of the best of days.

So I've rung my fabulous new podiatrist and, shock, horror, she's got the flu so I'll have to wait until next week to see her.

Apologies to anyone in my office who has had to put up with me hobbling around in my stockings today. It may last another couple of days, but I will be back into shoes as soon as possible. I promise.

J. (aka Hop-a-long Cassidy)