A Tale of Three Feet
When you have circulatory issues of any kind, the areas that get hit hard are the fingers, toes, feet, sinuses and ears. Diabetics end up with serious foot problems and can end up needing part or all of one or both feet amputated.
In addition to that, crud runs downhill so, for example, gout flares are typically felt first in the big toe. My dad had gout and at one point I had to avoid orange juice because I was beginning to have gout-like symptoms. Gout is a build-up of a certain acid in the system and CF makes you prone to being too acid (and my father had to be a carrier or I wouldn't have CF -- carriers have MILDER symptoms but ARE affected by being carriers).
I was homeless for nearly six years and on the street with my two adult sons. We generally had a 6x6 two-person tent that was about 4 feet or 4.5 tall.
We did that because a small tent was easier to hide, they were cheap AND in winter a two-person tent kept us warmer than a larger tent. It was short enough that our body heat warmed the entire interior and we stayed comfy.
Heat rises, so we found that bigger tents had warm air near the ceiling while we laid on the ground and struggled to get warm and stay warm. The air near the ground was not warm and it was a problem on cold nights.
We spent a few years in San Diego County before moving to Fresno. Fresno has much colder winters than San Diego County and our first winter in Fresno, I routinely arrived at camp after my sons who had already set up the tent and I was badly hypothermic and in distress and both my feet were numb.
So we stuck me in the middle and threw a blanket over me and I was soon warm, so this ended up being manageable, but it was very distressing.
Something changed between our first winter and second winter in Fresno and I didn't get chilled as easily the second winter. I arrived home chilled but not badly hypothermic and the level of crisis was much less.
Notably, that second winter I would get home and my right foot was numb but my left foot was merely cold. Circulation to my left foot apparently substantially improved our first year there and the left foot stayed warmer than my right foot thereafter.
In recent months, I have had intermittent pain in my lower right leg that I recognized as something in the process of resolving. I mean, at first I was concerned but then I concluded it's something getting better, not worse, and it was annoying but I quit worrying about it.
In the last day or two, I have somewhat randomly had pain and tingling in the toes of my right foot, which implies something has dramatically improved in my lower leg and now my toes are getting better circulation.
I've talked before on this site about circulation to my hands improving and it causing me to wake up every morning with pain in my fingers for weeks or months at a time. So this is not unprecedented and as a general rule of thumb, semi-necrotic tissue -- tissue STARVED of resources and not really FULLY alive -- hurts like a bitch when it comes back to life.
A good guess is I may have had a clot in my lower leg -- and may still have a clot, though it's probably smaller -- or otherwise had a spot with impaired circulation for some reason.
Clot is a good guess for two reasons:
He and I had gone on a road trip to visit relatives of his and on the way home, I had to do more of the driving even though I only had a learner's permit because he was in a lot of pain and there was a large, visible knot in the back of his leg.
So he went to see a doctor soon after we got back home. The doctor told him "You have a really bad clot. We need to amputate."
My dad fought in the front lines of two wars and was cynical as all hell. He felt that doctor "just wanted to practice his surgical technique" and didn't actually give a damn about my dad's welfare and dad got a second opinion.
The second doctor told my dad "Well, we can give you blood thinners and you can do hot and cold treatments to try to break it up. If it doesn't resolve, we will need to amputate." because the clot was so large, it was potentially life threatening. If part of it had broken off and gone to his heart, it could have killed him.
It was summer, so I was not in school. Everyone else in the family had either moved out already or they worked full time, so I'm the person who administered the hot and cold treatments to my dad's leg for a week.
I would boil water and toss a small towel into it and then fish it out with a tool, squeeze most of the water out of it and take it to my dad in the bathroom. He would howl in pain, possibly the most disturbing sound I have ever heard, and an hour later -- still breathing hard and visibly distressed -- tell me "Okay. NEXT treatment." and I would get him an ice pack out of the freezer.
So we broke the clot up and he got to keep his leg.
That same year -- the year I was seventeen -- his long-standing back issues flared worse than usual one cold morning and doctors prescribed him corrective shoes after concluding one of his legs was shorter than the other and also gave him a sheet of recommended exercises.
The corrective shoes were shoes with one that had a very thick sole to compensate for one leg being shorter than the other. So he's impaired and has ONE heavy-as-hell shoe making his attempts to walk even MORE burdensome (because Y'ALL ARE IDIOTS).
I had taken gymnastics and had a bunch of massage books and yadda. I was like "There is no way in hell you spent 26.5 years in the INFANTRY marching all over God's green Earth with one leg nearly two inches shorter than the other." and also let him know my opinion of the lousy recommendations on the exercise sheet.
So I modified his exercises and also spent a week using advanced stretching techniques to improve his flexibility in short order -- which takes some knowhow or you can hurt someone, so I am NOT describing it here -- and got him walking more normally.
So I fixed his back issues and I don't think he ever again had an incident where he couldn't readily get out of bed on a cold winter morning. And after maybe a few months of my help, he stuck the corrective shoes in the closet and never wore them again.
And I am tacking the story about his back issues onto this post because my experience as an adult is that gate issues are rooted in hip issues and this can impact circulation to the legs. So his clot and his back/"short leg" issues may have been related.
In addition to that, crud runs downhill so, for example, gout flares are typically felt first in the big toe. My dad had gout and at one point I had to avoid orange juice because I was beginning to have gout-like symptoms. Gout is a build-up of a certain acid in the system and CF makes you prone to being too acid (and my father had to be a carrier or I wouldn't have CF -- carriers have MILDER symptoms but ARE affected by being carriers).
I was homeless for nearly six years and on the street with my two adult sons. We generally had a 6x6 two-person tent that was about 4 feet or 4.5 tall.
We did that because a small tent was easier to hide, they were cheap AND in winter a two-person tent kept us warmer than a larger tent. It was short enough that our body heat warmed the entire interior and we stayed comfy.
Heat rises, so we found that bigger tents had warm air near the ceiling while we laid on the ground and struggled to get warm and stay warm. The air near the ground was not warm and it was a problem on cold nights.
We spent a few years in San Diego County before moving to Fresno. Fresno has much colder winters than San Diego County and our first winter in Fresno, I routinely arrived at camp after my sons who had already set up the tent and I was badly hypothermic and in distress and both my feet were numb.
So we stuck me in the middle and threw a blanket over me and I was soon warm, so this ended up being manageable, but it was very distressing.
Something changed between our first winter and second winter in Fresno and I didn't get chilled as easily the second winter. I arrived home chilled but not badly hypothermic and the level of crisis was much less.
Notably, that second winter I would get home and my right foot was numb but my left foot was merely cold. Circulation to my left foot apparently substantially improved our first year there and the left foot stayed warmer than my right foot thereafter.
In recent months, I have had intermittent pain in my lower right leg that I recognized as something in the process of resolving. I mean, at first I was concerned but then I concluded it's something getting better, not worse, and it was annoying but I quit worrying about it.
In the last day or two, I have somewhat randomly had pain and tingling in the toes of my right foot, which implies something has dramatically improved in my lower leg and now my toes are getting better circulation.
I've talked before on this site about circulation to my hands improving and it causing me to wake up every morning with pain in my fingers for weeks or months at a time. So this is not unprecedented and as a general rule of thumb, semi-necrotic tissue -- tissue STARVED of resources and not really FULLY alive -- hurts like a bitch when it comes back to life.
A good guess is I may have had a clot in my lower leg -- and may still have a clot, though it's probably smaller -- or otherwise had a spot with impaired circulation for some reason.
Clot is a good guess for two reasons:
- Covid promotes clotting and I've had Covid.
- The summer I was seventeen, my dad had a large clot in his lower leg that could have cost him his leg.
He and I had gone on a road trip to visit relatives of his and on the way home, I had to do more of the driving even though I only had a learner's permit because he was in a lot of pain and there was a large, visible knot in the back of his leg.
So he went to see a doctor soon after we got back home. The doctor told him "You have a really bad clot. We need to amputate."
My dad fought in the front lines of two wars and was cynical as all hell. He felt that doctor "just wanted to practice his surgical technique" and didn't actually give a damn about my dad's welfare and dad got a second opinion.
The second doctor told my dad "Well, we can give you blood thinners and you can do hot and cold treatments to try to break it up. If it doesn't resolve, we will need to amputate." because the clot was so large, it was potentially life threatening. If part of it had broken off and gone to his heart, it could have killed him.
It was summer, so I was not in school. Everyone else in the family had either moved out already or they worked full time, so I'm the person who administered the hot and cold treatments to my dad's leg for a week.
I would boil water and toss a small towel into it and then fish it out with a tool, squeeze most of the water out of it and take it to my dad in the bathroom. He would howl in pain, possibly the most disturbing sound I have ever heard, and an hour later -- still breathing hard and visibly distressed -- tell me "Okay. NEXT treatment." and I would get him an ice pack out of the freezer.
So we broke the clot up and he got to keep his leg.
That same year -- the year I was seventeen -- his long-standing back issues flared worse than usual one cold morning and doctors prescribed him corrective shoes after concluding one of his legs was shorter than the other and also gave him a sheet of recommended exercises.
The corrective shoes were shoes with one that had a very thick sole to compensate for one leg being shorter than the other. So he's impaired and has ONE heavy-as-hell shoe making his attempts to walk even MORE burdensome (because Y'ALL ARE IDIOTS).
I had taken gymnastics and had a bunch of massage books and yadda. I was like "There is no way in hell you spent 26.5 years in the INFANTRY marching all over God's green Earth with one leg nearly two inches shorter than the other." and also let him know my opinion of the lousy recommendations on the exercise sheet.
So I modified his exercises and also spent a week using advanced stretching techniques to improve his flexibility in short order -- which takes some knowhow or you can hurt someone, so I am NOT describing it here -- and got him walking more normally.
I do not remember most of the exercises, but I do remember this: They prescribed STRAIGHT LEG situps, which are both hard on the back and easy on the stomach muscles. I changed that to bent-knee situps and sat on his feet. He COULD easily do multiple bent-knee situps without pain even though they require stronger stomach muscles.I also spent several months giving him daily massages to address his back issues. The root cause of his "short leg" was the fact that he dislocated his shoulder thirteen times while in the military and what that had done to his upper back had never fully healed. I would massage a spot between his shoulder and neck and he could feel it in his foot.
So I fixed his back issues and I don't think he ever again had an incident where he couldn't readily get out of bed on a cold winter morning. And after maybe a few months of my help, he stuck the corrective shoes in the closet and never wore them again.
And I am tacking the story about his back issues onto this post because my experience as an adult is that gate issues are rooted in hip issues and this can impact circulation to the legs. So his clot and his back/"short leg" issues may have been related.
