Lament For My Feet

These are my feet, and one of my size-14 shoes. My poor feet are the main sufferers of chemotherapy these days. Chemotherapy causes all sorts of interesting and unpleasant side effects, but it turns out that for me, the longest-lasting side effect of them all is neuropathy in my feet. The chemo drugs damaged my peripheral nerves. In the heyday of chemo, I had neuropathy all the way up both legs to above my knees, and even in my hands, but since I stopped chemo, the damage has mostly healed. Now it's just concentrated in my feet, and it may never go away entirely. For a while my oncologist had me on Neurontin to help with the neuropathy, but drugs like Neurontin aren't without their own risks and we finally decided that the I'd be better off with the discomfort than with the drug.

What's it feel like? It's like my feet went to sleep and are just starting to wake up - endless tingling and prickling for the most part, but some days it's more achy and unpleasant than that. You get used to it and it isn't any particular badge of honor to live with this sort of neuropathy, but it does make me a little jumpy. My nerves are now uber-sensitive and the slightest touch on the soles of my feet makes me squeal and squirm. It's somewhere in between being highly ticklish and having an actual seizure.

A while back I was in my garage goofing around - barefoot, as I usually am around the house. I heard the garbage truck coming and decided to hustle the can out to the road across about forty feet of gravel. So I did, and such as my hurry that I didn't realize that I'd driven my entire nervous system into total collapse with that much overstimulation of my sad nerves. I couldn't walk. I could hardly stand. I was a seething, writhing pillar of acute nervous agitation, and I couldn't even move when the garbage truck swept up in a cloud of diesel smoke and dust.

I stood there, smiling blandly at the truck driver. The driver looked down at me. Moments passed. No, really, I'm fine, I'm just standing here like a fool because I'm very interested in how the truck's claws grab my trash can and hoist it. Nothing going on here. No nerves freaking out in my feet. By the way, there seems to be a minor leak in one of your hydraulic cylinders... He waved. I waved. Finally he seemed to shrug and hoisted the can, and I stood there the whole time.

It took me about fifteen minutes to pick my back across the gravel. I'd take a step and have to pause for about thirty seconds to let the nervous agitation wane a bit, and then I'd take another step. For a time I felt like a French Foreign Legionnaire in one of those March Or Die movies, tottering on my last remaining strength toward Fort Zinderneuf. I considered sitting down and sliding on my butt toward the smooth safety of the concrete, but then I became anxious about rasping the skin off my butt on that expanse of gravel. Plus the gravel was hot. It was a case of either making my feet suffer, or grinding my buttocks into Swiss steak. I suppose I could have stopped, dropped, and rolled toward safety, but how do you explain that to your neighbors? "It's okay, I decided to roll back to the garage. Suddenly I'm an eight year old boy again. Whee."

I suppose the moral of the story is that I should wear shoes when I go outside, but I often don't. Shoes hurt. Wearing shoes for any length of time makes it feel as though I've clamped my toes in a bench vise, and that isn't much fun either.

What's a boy to do? Pour lots and lots of concrete, I guess. Or make someone else take the trash can out to the road.

But I kid my feet. They've actually been pretty reliable, considering the abuse I've heaped on them, and I wouldn't blame them if they gave up on me altogether. One day I might wake up and find that my feet have detached themselves and gone off to live with some rich guy who does nothing but sit in hot tubs all day. Who could blame them?