My Story

I have always been an active person; it is part of my identity. I grew up playing sports: soccer, basketball, and lacrosse. In high school there was no off season. I was either playing basketball or lacrosse or both. I continued to play in college, just not at the same level, playing intramural basketball and club lacrosse. I was the captain and an officer during my time on the Mines Club Lax team. It was an important part of my life. I’ve always liked running as a workout and also loved hiking mountains. I loved hiking 14ers, mountains with heights above 14,000 feet in Colorado, and I wanted to hike at least all the class 1 and 2 14ers in Colorado.

However, that dream along with my activity level came to a halt.

I am an incredibly cheap, frugal person; it’s just how I grew up, how I was raised. I was the person that always bought the cheapest shoes possible and wore them until there were holes. Turns out, that is not great for your feet. As I began work after college, I would have days where I was on my feet a lot in knock-off vans with zero support and so, as one might guess, my feet started to hurt. At first, I just powered through, just thinking my feet needed to adjust, and when that didn’t work, I did try to start buying better footwear. But the pain continued. I tried to solve it on my own with the usual plantar fasciitis stretches and various orthotics you could buy at Walgreens. I even tried not running for a while. But the pain stayed. I remember wanting to go to a concert so bad, but knew my feet hurt. I wore my hiking boots to the concert, hoping the stability would help. It didn’t. I traveled to Italy with my family and took a plethora of different shoes and orthotics and tape, hoping I could manage to still walk everywhere without reeling in pain. That trip told me I had to see a doctor.

My pain had started in late 2018 and it took me until September of 2019 to finally start going to a podiatrist. I tried his orthotics. No improvement. Then I did cortisone injections. No improvement, potentially getting worse at this point. I thought I was frustrated then, but this was only the beginning of the long list of treatments and doctors visits I would go through. I did 8 weeks of physical therapy. It was originally planned for much less but we kept going because I wasn’t seeing improvement. We also did some ultrasound treatments. The therapist eventually told me that was all she could do for me. Hoping I was better, I tried walking around Florida to enjoy my Christmas and ended up in tears at the amount of pain I was in. I had been doing my physical therapy religiously. Why wasn’t it helping or making a difference?

Next was wearing a boot on each foot for 4 weeks each (separately, the doctor said I didn’t want to look like a transformer with 2 boots at a time) to see if the rest would help. It didn’t. I remember getting recognized at work during this time and the long, embarrassing walk up to the front of the stage in my boot. I felt ridiculous. I hadn’t really injured myself or gotten a surgery, so why was I looking dumb in a boot? I hated standing out and having to explain it to people. I hoped to never wear that boot again…but it was only the beginning.

Next, I got an MRI. The MRI saw very little evidence of plantar fasciitis, I felt crazy. Why was I in so much pain when the MRI called it mild? Then COVID hit and I thought maybe the work from home environment and staying at home all the time would give my feet the rest they needed to finally get better. I even got custom orthotics, which felt like a massive investment. But 7 months later, I was back at the same podiatrist ready to give surgery a go because nothing was changing. I was convinced surgery would work so I did my left foot and then my right foot surgeries back to back, just to find out that they didn’t’ help.

Not. At. All.

As you can imagine I was feeling pretty distraught at this point. How the heck could I not be better? I was told the surgery had a 95% success rate, but both feet failed? What was wrong with me? The podiatrist recommended MORE surgery, this time on my Achilles, and I was not sold on the idea. Why would I risk cutting up more of my body? I went back to do PT for 8 more weeks, hoping it would help but again, it made no difference. The PT even included dry needling with electrical stimulation in both my feet and my calves. Dry needling in your feet is not fun.

I started looking into options outside of insurance and started researching and reading scientific journals. I tried an amniotic injection on my left foot, however, I did this with the podiatrist without ultrasound guidance which means it might have not even been injected into the right location. I got one more set of custom orthotics and then never went back to that podiatrist since the only other option he had for me was more surgery. I had also gotten 2nd opinions from some other doctors within Colorado Springs, where I was living, and the only other suggestion I got was another surgery: doing a gastrocnemius (gastroc) recession. Which, again, I didn’t want to do more surgery, but I kept it in the back of my mind as the research I had found suggested this was a potentially successful option compared to the Achilles surgery.

I started going to doctors up in Denver. I went to the Steadman Hawkins Clinic where lots of pro athletes are treated and hoped someone there would be able to fix me. I got another MRI done which showed tearing and plantar fasciitis. However, I was told this didn’t mean anything since I had already had surgery. I then was referred to a doctor to do shockwave therapy – once a week for 5 weeks. I also did a nerve study on my right leg (should have been both but my referral got messed up) to see if a nerve entrapment or nerve damage was the source of pain. I was told that the small nerves in the feet really couldn’t be tested, it was more of the larger nerves farther up the leg. The results came back normal. Just to double check, I did a hydro dissection on my left foot in which saline was injected near my Baxter’s nerve to help set the nerve free if it was entrapped. Nothing worked. And because medical treatments and getting into appointments is an aggravatingly slow process, this was 6 additional months of me not getting any better. The doctor at Steadman Hawkins Clinic said we could try surgery again. He wanted to do a tarsal tunnel release and an open plantar fascia release to really see what was going on inside my foot. I went ahead and did the surgery and also had him do a gastroc recession at the same time. I called it my hail mary surgery. If this couldn’t fix the issue, I wasn’t sure much else could. The doctor was confident he had fixed me. He said the tarsal tunnel had been very tight and he had released the nerve there. If it went well and if I was able to fully recover and figure out if it helped this time, we’d do the other foot.

The recovery period for this surgery was much longer with no weight bearing for a month and then a slow recovery process. 3 months after the surgery, on my birthday, in Mexico, I let go of the hope I had been clinging to. I knew, the surgery had done nothing. This was the lowest I had ever been. I didn’t know where to go from here. There had always been hope, something I could do next, this felt like the end. It broke me.

I came back home and did more physical therapy and started going to more doctors again. I did PRP on both feet, at the same time, with multiple injection sights on each foot. At this point in time, my pain was just about everywhere in my foot. It ran along both sides of my feet from my heel to my toes, so we injected PRP in several locations to try to cover all the pain points. It was an hour of very unpleasant injections, but I told myself it would be worth it. It wasn’t.

I tried a chiropractor and did laser treatment and electric stimulation (which I had done at PT before) and got nowhere. I went to a rheumatologist and got a chest x-ray and bloodwork done to see if there was some autoimmune disorder behind all this. And though I was relieved I was normal, I was disappointed to not have an answer to why. That’s one of the things I still grapple with. Why won’t I heal? What is really causing my pain? Is it really just plantar fasciitis or is there something else going on?

At this point, I was told there were no other treatment options, only pain management. I did some drug trials, one of which was Lyrica, which had terrible side effects. We kept increasing my dosage to see if it would help and with every increase, I’d have the side effects all over again. I hated it. I joined a therapy group for pain and anxiety. I did a repeat of the nerve study on both feet and then did a nerve block on each side. The nerve block made me completely numb for 12hrs, but then I went exactly back to where I was. The pain management clinic said they couldn’t do anything else for me except try to do a peripheral nerve stimulator. I fought with insurance for 6+ months and had this temporary implant repeatedly denied.

And that brings us to current day 7/8/23, more than 4.5 years since my pain started. I’m exhausted, I’m frustrated, and I’m angry that our health care system has failed me. I want a physician to care, to help me, to not have to lead my own care and discover new treatments on my own; I am in need of an advocate. I am also emotionally exhausted with this process. I have researched and tried so many things, just to be let down every time. I had a couple year period where I just cried after every doctor appointment. I’ve gotten better at accepting where I’m at and am coming to terms with this chronic pain that may be with me for the rest of my life. I have struggled with how to have hope, but also live in the reality of the situation. I’m getting better at getting outside and doing what I can and traveling. I have to constantly remind myself to honor what my body needs and not push myself too much, even when I want to wander and explore a new town or go for a hike. It’s never going to stop being disappointing and frustrating, but I know I have to make the most of it and do what I can to get into nature, to learn, to experience new things, places, and cultures, because that makes me feel alive. It may look different, but getting out there and adapting how I do that is key to living my best life. I won’t let this chronic pain define me or stop me from finding joy in this world.