More Foot Torture

Saw Dr. Irving Wednesday afternoon for my prolotherapy appointment. We discussed a variety of treatments, the prolotherapy, which is a sugar and numbing solution injected into the site of pain, to put the body into a healing mode. Another is injecting botox, or platelets from my own whole blood, and finally my own whole blood. The doctor was not able to find any real research discussing any of these methods, only anecdotal evidence.

Since the botox and blood/blood products methods were going to be far more costly I opted to go for the prolotherapy injection. I don't like watching needles piercing my skin so I cannot tell you how many jabs I got. I do know that he injected both a mixture of dextrose and numbing solution and numbing solution alone. I did a lot of deep breathing and clenching of my hands. At one point he 'tickled' the tendon in my heal with the needle and my leg gave a couple of involuntary shudders, I managed to keep from kicking the doctor in the face or hands, thankfully. He was quite impressed with how I managed the pain, all that quality time on Carmen's table having my feet massaged, I guess I've built up a reasonable tolerance to pain. I guess if I know it's for the greater good I will tolerate it.

When he'd finished it felt like I had a giant water blister on the bottom of my heal. Not so much painful as just feeling weird. The numbing seemed to be working. Last night I had a couple of waves of "oh gawd, that aches". I was told to come back in 2-3 weeks to see how well it did or didn't work. If it seemed to work but there's more to be done we can do another injection, if it didn't seem to do anything we'll try the botox. If it worked and I don't need any more work on the right foot, I'll do it to the left foot. My 2-3 week appointment will be on April 9, I know, more than 3 weeks, he's going out of town until then.

Today went pretty ok. I'm walking with a pronounced limp and my foot aches some. It's a different type of pain than the usual, I'd like to think that's a good sign. I went for another Carmen massage this afternoon and she said I wasn't nearly as bad off as she was expecting. That's got to be good, too, right?