About my foot—an update

I broke the third metatarsal on May 16 (the break is in the foot, not the toe but it’s the third metatarsal). It broke clean through and as I wrote then, my orthopedist put me in a walking boot and continued following up with me.

I saw him June 23, when he said I could ditch the boot and use the carbon plate, and then again on August 4. At that point he said I could stop wearing the plate but I wasn’t cleared to run for another three months. I'm to see him then.

I’ll admit I tried a couple of trots (cannot call them runs) and my foot hurt, so I stopped. Things improved and I thought great, this may take a lot longer than I want but I’m on the mend.

Except in the last few weeks, I’ve had a shooting burning pain on the top of my toe on the same foot. Basically, it hurts when I point my toe. So if I were in child’s pose, my toe would hurt like the dickens. Since that wasn’t a broken bone issue, I got an appointment with the podiatrist I saw a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately about four days ago, the broken spot in my foot started hurting again. Ugh.

I saw the podiatrist today and told her about both things, and about the weird pain I’d had on the top of that same foot way back in March right as lockdown started. She got an x-ray of my foot and yep, she said, you can clearly see the break.

She thinks that painful spot on the top of my foot may have been referred pain from the third metatarsal as it was in the process of breaking.

The burning pain, she said, is almost certainly nerve pain. The medial dorsal cutaneous nerve runs from that bony spot on the top of the foot to the big toe and the next toe--it splits and each toe gets a nerve. She said that nerve has probably been aggravated by all of this and by the micro adjustments I make when I walk due to the broken foot. And it's true, I'm not walking normally, I can tell.

What’s less clear is whether it’s healing properly or not. She said there’s a chance I have a delayed union, or possibly a nonunion fracture. Because I was diagnosed over three months ago with this broken bone, she said she can prescribe a bone growth stimulator for my foot.

Well I’ve been there before with my pelvis so I know the drill.

She also wanted the records from my orthopedist so I jumped through those hoops to get those over to her. Once she’s got the original x-ray and dx from May 16, she can prescribe the bone growth stimulator. I’ll see her in another month when we’ll get another x-ray. She said we may need an MRI to see what’s going on, but we aren’t there yet.

In the meantime, I’m still not running but she did say it would be OK to use our indoor rowing machine. Rowing is boring but if that's my only option, then I guess I will be bored.