My depressed feet

In May of 2000, a friend laid down a challenge for me to run a marathon. I am physically unable to refuse a challenge so I signed up for the St. George Marathon scheduled for Oct of 2000. I started training June, giving me four months to get ready for the marathon. My first run was a three miler that just about killed me. However, it is amazing how your body responds to training and how quickly you can go from struggling with three miles to running 15 miles without any problem.

I was hooked. I loved the way being a runner made me feel. I loved the way that I could eat and eat and still loose weight (a 20 mile training run burns an awful lot of calories). I loved the running community. I continued to run after completing the St. George marathon. I ran the Portland marathon in 2001 and signed up for the Victoria marathon in 2002.

One Saturday, approximately 7 miles into a 14-mile training run, the bottoms of my feet began to hurt. The pain wasn't horrible, but it was the type of pain that suggested that something was really fucked up, so I made a doctors appointment. I was diagnosed with a standard running injury, though my symptoms didn't really match the diagnosis very well, and the doc gave me a bunch of exercises and an icing regime to follow.

The pain didn't go away. It spread and increased in intensity. The doc wasn't very helpful. He thought that I wasn't being rigorous with the exercise and icing schedule and pretty much ignored me when I said that even just walking was becoming extremely difficult.

I put up that attitude for about 6 months and finally switched docs. This one took me seriously. She got me into physical therapy and we started to explore other treatment options. She heard me when I said that my life was shutting down, that the pain that came from walking was becoming debilitating.

Physical therapy didn't help, so we began to explore other options. We considered the possibility that the initial diagnosis was wrong and went in search of other causes. I had two MRIs, several x-rays, and saw multiple doctors. We considered pinched nerves, tumors, autoimmune disease, and other possibilities. I tried multiple drugs including muscle relaxants, neuronton, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, and prednisone. Nothing helped. The pain just kept increasing.

Now, the past two paragraphs represent 2 years of my life. Simple things were difficult. Things like cooking dinner, going grocery shopping, and doing chores. I didn't go on any vacations because all I would be able to do is sit in the hotel room. I did anything and everything I could to make my life as functional as possible. I found that a particular pair of flip-flops made life a little more bearable, so I never took them off. I even wore them in the shower. For an entire year, I wore them every day except for the two days that it snowed. I felt grateful that I worked in a lab that allowed open-toed shoes. Many labs don't. As a grad student, I was required to teach. I hated teaching sitting down. I wasn't as effective sitting down, so I would just deal with the pain. Sometimes after class I would cry in the bathroom because my feet hurt so much and because I couldn't do something as simple as stand for an hour without great effort.

I didn't realize it, but I was very depressed during that time period. I finally realized that the only thing I ever looked forward to was going to sleep, and that I dreaded getting up.

At my first appointment after this realization, my doc said she had an idea, kind of a last ditch effort and that it might help my depression too. She said that sometimes pain is caused by the mis-firing of pain neurons, and that they can get to the point where they can't turn off. She said that a certain class of drugs, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, can sometime help. Se prescribed the most common drug of this class, prozac. Rolaids can fuck me because prozac spells relief. Though my feet didn't get completely better, walking and life became bearable again.

Fast forward to Feb of this year. I had been on prozac from ~2 years. Although my feet still bothered me, I was living a normal life again. I was able to participate in activities I would have never considered during the dark years. I had joined a rowing club and started rowing crew! In Feb, I decided to try life without prozac. I hoped that my depression and the pain would stay away, even without the drugs. Besides the side-effects were getting to me. Climaxing during sex required a lot of, um, concentration. My sex-drive was also limited and I hated prozac burps. If you have ever taken prozac, you know what I mean.

It has been two months since I went off of prozac. My feet have not regressed and I haven't slipped back into depression. Also! The big O is no longer a monumental effort and I actually have a sex drive.

I think that I have accepted the possibility that my feet will always bother me. However, news articles and tv shows about marathons and marathon runners cause a great burning lump to form in my throat. I am still a runner. A runner who can't run. Sometimes, I want to run so much that the backs of my eyes burn I have to take deep breaths to maintain composure. I don't expect that will ever get easier.