A friend pointed out to me that I had Mr. Spock toes. It turns out, I tore the ligament that holds the toes together so that the foot does not look like an ape's foot. I had two impressive injuries to that foot. When I was about seven, I stepped on a very large nail. It went through my shoe through my foot up the top of my shoe and brought meat with it. Filled my shoe with blood. About 20 years ago I dropped a kitchen knife onto my foot, and it stood there straight up. According to a podiatrist, those two wounds were enough to start the large ligament tearing. Also, in younger days, skating, riding a racing bike long distances, and horseback riding, all contributed to that ligament tearing. There have been about six or seven guys come up to me and ask me if I was a hockey player. Apparently this is a common affliction among those who hock.
I found a way of binding two of my toes together, then took my foot to the shop. The podiatrist told me that there were two unpleasant surgeries with long recovery times. But most people do what I do, bind the two toes or wear compression socks.
And now, for your amusement,
In the wonderful cartoon show Adventure Time, Finn gets magically turned into a giant foot and he has a binding on those two toes.
Your Face
I’ve suspected for many years that I have a touch of face blindness. Its worse than I suspected. On three occasions I did not recognize my own children out in public. And in other occasions, I did not recognize people I knew well out there in the world. There are a few more examples.
In 2019, the year before COVID, Sarah and I got possibly the worst flu I’ve ever had in my life. I have a story about it, but I’ve already taken up a lot of your time here. Then in early 2020 I got COVID so bad that twice I woke up and Sarah and Lily were standing over me, debating whether or not to call 911. I figured out that some of the bad effects of COVID was from swallowing the copious amount of snot. Once I started spitting it out into and filling up a bowl, I started feeling a bit better. Eventually, in hospitals, they had COVID patients doing that and then they didn’t have to be intubated. It took me about a year before my lungs got back to normal after Covid
Throughout my pre COVID life, I would sometimes feel restless. A walk, or a drive, or some interesting intense activity would take care of it. Since COVID I don’t feel restless anymore.
The last therapist I’ve been seeing is actually a physical therapist. Amy was recommended by my neurologist. Most of her patients are stroke victims. But she has helped me understand in what ways I am wired differently, and a couple of ways to maneuver through those differences. Perhaps the most impressive thing she has found is that I am left-handed. All my life people have called me ambidextrous, I’m not, I’m left-handed. She found that my right hand is a fraction of a second slower than my left hand because my brain has one more processing step to do, translating to the right hand. .
Amy is a genius. Awareness of handedness and a few other thinking hacks have made big improvements in my daily life. Thank you Amy!
My Right Arm (is complete again)
About 10 years ago, I had a pain in my mid upper arm. Took it into the shop, and after many scans was bounced around to six different surgeons. Finally, the seventh one, an old sports doctor, nearing retirement, told me that they had never seen a tumor in that part of the body, and so didn't know what to do about it. So what do I do about it? says I. He said that he would be reluctant to biopsy it because there's a good possibility that sepsis would develop. And if he tried to go in there and remove it, it would badly affect the movement of my arm. He recommended living with the pain, and with any luck it would go away. I lived with it, and it went away. But a couple years ago, it came back. A little different. And since I was playing with anti-inflammatory spices, I noticed that the pain really was influenced by ginger and blueberries. I was content with taking care of it that way. My neurologist sent me to a physical therapist. I was skeptical, but off I went. He poked around and found that I had a portion of my pectoral muscle badly inflamed, from the sturnum to the arm, but the pain for me would be felt in my upper arm. Various treatments, various exercises, and the perspective of another way, and my arm is moving so much better. Physical therapists are the real doctors.
@ Dr. Gold, a brilliant psychologist at Children’s Hospital, was presenting a program that Sarah and I went to. More about it here.
Each time I went to mental therapy they all suggested to me that I was suffering from PTSD. I couldn’t quite see it.
But Dr. Gold talked about the PTSD that the parents of a sick kid experience. And how many of these issues never get resolved. I could see that in my parents, especially my mom. It wasn’t my experience to process, but my parent’s PTSD that was unresolved. This helped me forgive my mom a little bit.
Additionally, the penultimate therapist I went to actually identified the PTSD I was going through, see more about this here.
And she gave me the official diagnosis of being autistic, which I already suspected. Many adults in my childhood helped me constructively understand that I was not wired in a conventional way.
I’ve never felt weird about it. In fact, as with my illness, I think all of these conditions are blessings.
If you’re still reading here, I’m impressed. Thanks for sticking with this. I don’t think I have ever cataloged all of these things in one place. And you might be pleased to know that I skipped a lot of things.
Thank you for reading all this, and providing me with a place to put all these details in one place.
"Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors
call what they do practice?"
George Carlin