My Achilles' heel

Ladies, don't throw away the removable pocket of your mastectomy camisole! You can use it to cover your toes when you get your foot in a cast to heal your Achilles tendon! NB: When the temperature drops to the teens, you'll have to use a fuzzy sock instead.

Yes, I am casted in fiberglass. It looks like I broke my leg. The cast is there to keep me from moving my foot up and down so that my Achilles tendon can get some rest. It needs to rest because a couple of weeks before the cast, the back of my ankle hurt every time I walked. It is not ruptured, but it is inflamed.

When the cast is removed, on Dec. 22, I will need twice-weekly massage for I don't know how long. Three days later we are going to San Francisco, land of hills.

I'm driving everywhere instead of walking and clumping up and down the stairs and using elevators. I've been to two of my regular yoga classes and I was able to do some of the positions. But having your foot semi-permanently flexed does get in the way of many things, including downward-facing dog and child's pose.

Achilles' mother, you may recall, made him immortal by dunking him in the River Styx. Unfortunately, she held him by the heel and so that part of his body was vulnerable, mortal.

There are other stories about Achilles. They say that he tried to avoid his predicted death from battle by dressing as a woman. All the girls were offered presents. He outed himself by choosing a weapon instead of something girly.

But as we all know, in myths you can't outwit your fate. It comes and grabs you and shakes you and makes you weak.


His fatal flaws, besides his mortal heel, were pride and stubbornness. He died by an arrow shot into his heel. Which must have hurt way more than my tendonitis.



The cause of my pain is overuse or worn-out shoes or cortisone or antibiotics. Antibiotics? How does that make sense? We take one remedy for one problem then of course the side effects cause another problem, for which we have to have treatment. And so on and so on until we slip slide away.