Eyes and Feet

It's been an interesting few days.

Friday I had an eye test. One of the things they have to do when you get diagnosed with Diabetes is get an eye test to check for diabetic retinopathy. This is when high blood sugar levels damage the cells of the eye, and can lead to blindness. They check for this by taking photographs of the back of the eye, with the help of eye drops that dilate the pupil and some very bright lights when taking the photograph, both of which leave you with very blurred vision for a couple of hours afterwards and a need to wear dark glasses till your eyes recover.

My eyes were fine for diabetic retinopathy, of course, but I am slightly short-sighted and have astigmatism of my eyeballs - basically my eyeballs are short and more rugby ball-shaped instead or sphere-shaped like they should be. So I now have glasses for distance work and whenever I'm using the computer or doing fine detail work for a long period of time. It's slightly odd because last time I had an eye test (which was admittedly about 12 years ago) I had one short-sighted eye and one long-sighted eye. Apparently since then the long-sighted eye has fixed itself a bit to enthusiastically as now both eyes are short-sighted.

Saturday morning I went to the gym again. I went by bus this time to save money, and while I learned the routes I had to walk a fair bit further than I'd planned as the bus driver on the way there dropped me off at the wrong stop. But hey, an extra 15 minutes walking each way isn't going to do me any harm, is it? Once at the gym, I worked on the treadmill, some of the resistance machines and the stationary bike - and it was on the latter that I started to have a problem. The soles of my feet started to hurt as I was cycling. I recognised the pain (or at least I thought I did at first) as the return of my old enemy plantar fasciitis, which I've suffered from on and off since I was six years old. So I didn't think too much of it, even when it hurt so badly that I could barely walk to the bus stop when I was done.

Except that several hours after I'd gotten home, the pain in my left foot hadn't gone away, and painkillers had done nothing to touch the pain. (For the record, the pain was at about an 8 on this pain scale, occasionally going up to a 9.) The pain in my right foot had gone away after about an hour, which made it even more noticible. So I started to get worried. And by Sunday morning, both Nick and I were quite worried indeed, as the pain was so bad that I couldn't sleep and even Nick's codeine painkillers weren't touching the pain. Concerned that I'd managed to give myself a stress fracture of the foot, we headed off to the A&E department.

An hour and a half and an x-ray later and they were reasonably sure I hadn't broken my foot, and it was in fact just a really bad case of plantar fasciitis. One that still requires me to be off my feet for the next few days, and that I actually have permission to take double the normal amount of painkillers for until it eases up. Which leads me to now, lying on the sofa with the Chromebook and spending my time crocheting and watching the Investigation Discovery channel on TV. The pain is still there, wobbling between 6 and 8 on the scale, but the increased painkiller amounts do dull things enough that I can sleep when I've taken them. And Nick is in the unusual position of having to do and fetch things for me for once, which isn't much easier for him but it's not like we can train the cats to do it.

Oh, and I probably won't be going to the gym for a few days either.