I don’t know if it’s been reading about the potential SAG strike or the fact that we’re going to have a double-unit Monday to welcome us back from Thanksgiving, but apparently my problem of grinding my teeth has gotten a bit worse.

And by “a bit worse” I mean, goddamn, the tendons in my jaw are killing me. It started early this afternoon (I thought it was a cavity until I realized I could push on the teeth I thought were affected and felt nothing, but opening my mouth absolutely killed) and has been getting worse throughout the day.

I mean, perhaps it’s a good thing for my continued weight loss attempts that at the rate I’m going I’m not going to be able to open my mouth on Thanksgiving, but goddamn it, I want to be able to eat at least one of the three Thanksgiving dinners I’m stopping by.

Bah.

I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.

The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.

Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.

The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.

I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.

But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.

I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.

However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.

This probably wasn’t the most dignified way for the Caps to wind up tying their playoff game last night:

Note the guy that falls over: He took a direct hit to the family jewels with the puck, and now the poor bastard might wind up minus one of them.

Yow. Even being a Caps fan, I’m not sure that play shouldn’t have been blown dead before Mike Green scored. I think it happened too fast for the refs to realize what had happened, but still, sucks for the Flyers.

Thanks(?) to Deadspin for the tip.

Not only interwebs, but the return of SPECTACULAR HD to the Gigantic Damn Television, on which I am currently watching Oregon stomp Michigan, and laaaaaaaaughing and laughing.

The only problem is that I think I am going to need a bionic left foot. Anyone have a spare?

It’s called the “it takes a lot of effort and pain to get up” diet.

It forces you to ask yourself: Exactly how hungry am I? Generally, the answer is: Okay, not that hungry. Also, ow.

This is getting more ridiculous on a daily basis.

So I went to Dr. Hot Shit, who I’d been trying to get in with for a while (and who I got some strings pulled to get into), in order to get a third and final opinion on my foot.

Of course, he thinks something else is wrong with it than the first two guys seemed to be in general agreement that it was.

The good news is, he seems to have good reason. He took some new X-rays and basically was able to place the exact spot on my foot that has the most excruciating pain simply by looking at them and seeing something that’s been overlooked.

The better news is that if it is what he thinks it is (aggravation of the accessory navicular bone, for those who give a fuck), the fix is a lot less elaborate.

It still means surgery and a month on crutches, but only another month of rehab after, instead of another month in a walking cast and two more months of rehab for what the other guys think it is.

The weird part was, in order to help test his theory, he wanted to tape my foot to address his suspicion, then take some stress off my aggravated tendon (which is aggravated by my calf muscle on the bad leg being slightly too short).

He asked me to wear inch-and-a-half heels, and when I laughed “Do I look like someone who even owns shoes like that?” in his face at this suggestion, he asked me if I had cowboy boots.

And I thought, “Oh yeah, I guess those do have about inch-and-a-half heels.” And then I felt slightly dumb.

So I spent all of today taped up, wearing cowboy boots, and oddly substantially more comfortable than I should have been, given that I was wearing my single most uncomfortable pair of shoes.

So, possibly further details to come. I’m going back to Dr. Hot Shit tomorrow for a follow-up, and then to my original guy to say, “So, nice miss there, buck-o!” on Thursday.

Maybe I’ll even have a goddamn answer to what the fuck is going on. Wouldn’t that be nice?

So my orthopedist stuck me in a boot for a couple weeks starting last Thursday to try and stabilize my collapsing arch.

The boot is a little hilarious because it has a pump which can allegedly be used to pump up the cast to give more support. It’s about as effective as the pumps in my Reeboks in fifth grade, which is to say: Not effective at ALL.

Anyway, it seemed to be working over the weekend. My boss was out of town Thursday, and I just went to the gym (recumbent bike, which puts just about zero pressure on the ankle, plus arm-based lifting) and then slept all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

But Monday, when I went back to a real work schedule, the façade came down. My job involves a lot of running around, and when you’ve got one of these fuckers on, it’s like dragging an anchor around.

The good news was that it seemed to be doing its job and making the parts of my foot that had been hurting hurt a lot less.

The bad news was, it’s so heavy and immobilizing it’s a) killing the rest of my lower left leg and b) making me absolutely exhausted.

I’ve already made two dumb mistakes at the end of the day this week because I was so tired I couldn’t focus on anything but getting home and getting my leg out of Foot Jail.

Luckily I’ve finally got a second and third opinion set up in the next week, so at least I’ll have some idea of what can finally be done to rid myself of this horseshit on a more permanent basis. And really, rid all you of it too, since I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it.

Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop bitching about it though. I don’t think this blog would still exist if I didn’t have medical maladies to whine about.

So in anticipation of probably at least needing some sort of surgery and having to cart my ass around on crutches for a period of time longer than five minutes, I’ve started lifting weights.

The last time I was on crutches, I was on them for about three days of actually using them properly, and my arms just about fell off.

The fact that I’m very overweight also really hit me hard I was on crutches. Every time I took a step with crutches, it was basically like doing a 200+ lb bench press. I had just about zero muscle tone in my arms, and it became quite literally painfully obvious.

This time, however, I’ve got a little warning. I can at least focus my workouts so that my arms only feel like they’re going to fall off at a point where they don’t have to carry my body weight.

Since realistically any surgery is not going to happen until the third week of May, I’ve got about eight weeks to get my arms, shoulders, and chest as strong as possible, and it’s a race against time for me to try and get ready.

My start hasn’t been great. I can really only do about 30 lbs. on several of the machines, and no more than 50 on anything.

I did 50 on one machine this morning (I have no idea what it’s called, but you lift straight up over your head and it works the back and the muscles under your upper arm), and I couldn’t lift my arms above shoulder level until late this afternoon.

I’m going to try and meet with a trainer at my gym next week to get some advice on what muscle groups I need to target. Hopefully I can gain enough strength so that the transition to crutches isn’t too horrible.

However, if I don’t post for a few days, it probably means I’ve overdone it and I can’t lift my hands to the keyboard. If that happens, I’ll try to type out SEND HELP with my nose.

I had a longstanding follow-up appointment with my orthopedist today. I walked back and he was talking to my physical therapist (whose office is across the hall).

After I finished giving the PT a light berating for Tuesday’s fiasco, the orthopedist came in, and started investigating why my foot’s not getting better.

His conclusion: Two of the major tendons that hold my foot together (the anterior and posterior tibial tendons) are starting to fail. He thinks that I need to get surgery to prevent the tendons, anterior tendon in particular, from snapping.

And not just simple laproscpic surgery, no no. But “let’s disassemble and reassemble half your left leg” surgery that would leave me on crutches for 4-6 weeks.

Resetting at least one of the two affected tendons, lengthening the calf muscle (which he thinks is putting more strain on the tendons), and doing a couple other things that went over my head. 4-6 weeks, no weight on the foot at all.

I have a job where a substantial portion of my day is spent schlepping stuff from Point A to B, and occasionally to C. I live on the second floor of a building with no elevator. 4-6 weeks on crutches is going to be a special little corner of hell for me.

The orthopedist at least is willing to try re-targeting my physical therapy and really ramping it up for a couple weeks to see if it at least makes a difference.

He also, whether he likes it or not, will have to wait for both the show’s season to wrap filming (my boss is directing the finale, and ain’t no fucking way I’m dealing with that on crutches) and for me to get a second opinion, since I’m clearly not going through with anything this drastic without getting a second goddamn opinion.

I’ll know more in a couple weeks after doing the intensive PT and seeing how it works, but it’s not looking good. I’ve written off today to wallowing, but hopefully starting next week, the re-targeted PT will actually start paying off.

Cross your fingers for me.

So Tuesday was a miserably shittastic day for me, because my physical therapist decided one of my legs was shorter than the other.

I’d gone in for my weekly physical therapy, and while I’ve been making some progress with Mister Cranky Ankle, it’s been excruciatingly slow.

So he did some rather unscientific tests and became convinced that my good leg is about a quarter inch shorter than my bad leg, and that this was what was impeding my progress.

This despite the fact that the orthopedist had checked this when I initially had come in, and had found that my legs were the same length. Nine months ago.

Anyway, the physical therapist made some adjustments to the custom fit orthotics I had to get made after the first injury, and sent me on my way.

Problem was, the adjustments he made turned my legs against me in a rather violent fashion.

The heel lift on the good foot threw my entire right leg out of alignment, and put me in some rather excruciating knee pain for the better part of the day.

The small piece of foam he’d added to the arch of the bad foot started bruising the bottom of my foot (a problem I’d previously had in poorly fit orthotics) and that killed as well.

So after all these efforts to make me feel better, what happened? I ended up hobbling around the office and generally looking and feeling like my 89 year old grandmother.

When I got home last night, I took out all the crap he’d put in. Today, I was walking relatively normally and in substantially less pain than yesterday. Still more than I’d like, but I’ll certainly take “irritating as fuck” over “excruciating and making me consider stealing a cane from the prop department.”

I’m gonna give him a nice punch in the face (or at least the bicep) when I go in for my appointment next week.