Category: podiatry

I slowed to a walk, Bella panting happily by my ankles as she trotted alongside me for our nightly jog. I winced as my foot hit the path, a line of pain flaring up the muscles of my leg. After a few more steps it got bad enough that I had to hobble towards a park bench.

Bella trotted along happily, not overly concerned with my leg and foot pain as I collapsed onto the rough wooden seat. Had this been bothering me for a while? I wondered, as I worked my shoe off. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone for a run without some minor foot pain, but it had never been bad enough to sit me down, that was for sure.

A friend of mine had recommended I try compression socks for foot pain when I’d mentioned it to him, but I’d never gotten around to making the appointment with the podiatrist. Bella made a low whining noise – why were we still sitting, when we could be jogging?!

I laughed at her and took a deep breath. Looking up, I scoped out the distance to the car and saw that it was going to be quicker to complete our circuit of the park to get back to the car than it would be to just walk back the way we came. Bella’s tail wagged as she picked up on my plans, psychically. 

‘Should have just bitten the bullet and found me one of those good podiatrists near Cheltenham,’ I grunted, wrapping my hand around the arm of the bench and pushing up. I tested my weight on the injured foot and found that it was bearable enough.

‘Come on, Bell,’ I jerked my head, and the little dog yapped in delight that we were finishing our walk. She trotted along nicely beside me – clearly hoping that I wouldn’t notice I wasn’t holding her lead.

‘Nice try,’ I chuckled, but decided she could have a few metres off it at least.

I sat in the back of the cluttered classroom, foot idly tapping away at a song in my head – music players could be confiscated by overzealous teachers, I’d learned, but they couldn’t do anything about the hundreds of albums I’d been memorising since I was a toddler.

The teacher was droning on about something at the front of the room, gesturing limply at an equation on the board with his worn-down piece of chalk – probably a rousing lecture on where to buy foot care products in Cheltenham, or whatever boring thing adults cared about when they got old and started to experience new and exciting varieties of foot pain.

Whatever he was going on about, I had no doubt I would never need it in my life. Trigonometry? Please. My phone could do more maths in five seconds than Einstein could have managed in his entire life – and it wasn’t even particularly close. History? Every encyclopaedia ever written had been digitised a decade ago and uploaded to one website or another. English was a tricker one, until those AI chatbots were invented not too long ago…

So, yeah. I didn’t much see the point of hearing someone ancient drone on about something I didn’t want or need to care about, just because some bureaucrat, who had already been retired for thirty years, decided in a meeting once that I needed to have this bit of information told to me, in this order.

Hell, maybe I would have been paying attention if it was something unexpected, like learning about different arch support options. 

I became aware of a sudden silence and lack of movement in the room, and looked up from my distracted daze, the record in my head scratching to a stop.

‘Well, Ms. Jones?’ the teacher asked from the front of the class, arms folded sternly.

‘What’s that now?’ I frowned.

‘The answer,’ he said, exasperatedly tapping at the equation on the board. ‘How do we solve for it?’

‘Oh,’ I laughed. ‘Oh, that’s easy. One sec…’

I reached into my bag to pull out my phone.