I've been wearing my fracture boot for nearly 14 days (minus the 1.5 days I didn't have it during the Great Flood of '15 ), and I'm having a hard time with it. Not just the boot itself--its clunkiness, stuffiness, heaviness--but I'm reminded of how much longer I have to wear it and, more than that, I'm afraid the fracture isn't my only problem. I feel pain where I don't think I should, based on the location of my fracture (first metatarsal). More and more, I'm concerned that I also have a neuroma . I feel pain very specifically on the ball of my foot, around the third metatarsal head. My doctor said this could be "referred" pain from the fracture, but I'm not so sure. It's hard to know the timing of everything; I avoided getting a new MRI for weeks and weeks after initially feeling the foot pain in April, so I don't know how old (or new) the fracture was at the time of diagnosis. My hope is that, at my follow-up appointment in...

It sucked--I'm not gonna lie. I wore my "cam walker" boot for about three and a half weeks, minus a couple of weekends. That doesn't sound like a very long time, but it felt like ages. Getting dressed each day was a new and interesting challenge. I couldn't wear just anything; many of my usual clothing items didn't fit well with the boot, so I often opted for leggings (that part I loved ). Also, I had to wear a running shoe on my other foot to approximate the sole height of the boot on the other foot so I wasn't lopsided. This never made for a cute look. I even purchased a custom-made decorative fabric to go on the boot to make it less clinical-looking. But when said fabric arrived, it seemed to make the visibility of the boot nearly triple. (I never actually wore it this way in public.) Cute, no? No. I don't see anything diff--oh, there it is. Also, I wasn't entirely sure the boot was helping my foot get better. I originally got i...

I've been dealing with foot pain since completing the Clearwater Marathon , over a month ago, and while I surely thought I'd be past it by the time the Gasparilla race weekend rolled around, I am not. My meager attempts at resting my foot (in between little trial runs every few days) have not been sufficient. So I decided this past weekend to let go of my hope to run the Gasparilla half marathon. It was a really hard decision, as I look forward to this local race each year. It's my favorite. The Gasparilla 15k was my first long(er than a 5k) distance race, and the half marathon has been a great PR (personal record) course for me in recent years . But I knew that if I ran it, I'd want to run hard and try to PR, and that would possibly seriously injury my foot and certainly set my recovery time back even further. So I emailed the Gasparilla folks to see if I could get a deferment of my race registration for next year, almost entirely expecting a firm "no" b...