For weeks on end, I couldn’t take a shower without involving duct tape. To this day, I can’t wear dress shoes. All because of a lousy staph infection.

But wait. I digress. Let me take a giant, lurching step back to where it all started; back to the days when my footwear choices didn’t stop at “business casual.”

Whilst wearing serious, formal leather on my feet, I took a step off a loading dock and into a parking lot. This was not an accident. I was merely taking a shortcut out of a client’s plant.

When I landed, I crushed a nerve in my foot. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The only thoughts in my mind were:
1) My foot just exploded
2) My client is still watching me walk away
3) I will try not to curl up in Mr. Client’s parking lot and scream like a little girl.

Fast forward about six weeks. My wife was sick of me limping around the house like Quasimodo and demanded that I seek medical attention.

The doctor took a quick look at my foot and diagnosed it as a ”Morton’s neuroma.” This must be Latin for “watch me stab you with a giant needle” because that’s exactly what he did. He f***ing stuck a f***ing needle into my f***ing foot RIGHT where it hurt the f***ing most. He stuck it through the back of my foot, in between my toe knuckles, and directly into the nerve. He then repeated the process twice more!

So there I was flopping around on the gurney like a beached carp, and Doctor Pain has the audacity to say, “Come back if that doesn’t help.” News flash, Needle-Boy - it didn’t help.

I saw him again. Then I saw a specialist. Then another specialist. And yet another specialist. All of these people insisted in driving needles full of cortisone through the back of my foot and into my nerve. (Actually, one guy started between my toes and shoved the needle in that way, but the end result was the same.)

So FINALLY, after nearly a year of this acupuncture from Hell, an orthopedist told me that the only way I was going to get relief was to have the nerve cut out of my foot. I suspect this was due to the fact the poor nerve had been penetrated more times than Ricky Martin in a Puerto Rican prison, but I didn’t press the issue.

The surgery was to be minor. The recovery time was to be a couple of days. An incision was made in the top of my foot starting between the toes and going back a couple of inches toward my ankle. The foot bones were spread apart, and Captain Cutlery then cut down to the fat layer just above the skin on the bottom of my foot. He clipped off the offending nerve and threw it away.