Me, With 11 Toes
The dilemma: shed the bunion or wear ‘cumbersome clod-hoppers’
The uninvited, unexpected bunion made wearing nice shoes a mere memory, but removing the offender meant surgery and broken bones. Boomer reader Connie Cook shares her humorous bunion saga.
The 11th toe snuck up on me. I had the usual 10, then a large bunion formed on the outside of my left big toe. Uninvited, I should add, because 11 toes make it hard to find suitable footwear. The width required to house six toes on one foot is prohibitive. Good bye to pink running shoes and dress-up sandals with heels.
I tried a toe separator to keep that bunion in check, but when I wore the device to bed it somehow loosened and escaped, tucking itself at the bottom of the sheets as if banished from a kingdom of lower digits. I was sent to a surgeon who claimed I had the biggest bunion he’d ever witnessed and he was from Britain where apparently big toes grow bunions, a dime a dozen. He recommended having it offed, but I didn’t relish hobbling around for months in a foot cast.
I dragged my heels. I was forced to search for a suitable pair of boots as winter approached. Nothing was smart or pretty. My chiropodist carried a few cumbersome clod-hoppers that would have done, but they wouldn’t have done. They looked worse than what my grandfather wore out into the fields on his farm. Finally, I found a pair of extra wide winter boots on an online orthopedic supplies store and, sighing, sent my order in. They came back looking like military boots in stiff black leather. They weighed a ton so lifting them off the ground with each step was a chore. I stomped ungracefully through the winter snow, cursing the damned 11th toe that was giving me grief.
I had a meeting with my toes and outed the offender in front of the rest. Now I was calling him Toey the 6th.
“Do you want to wear army boots the rest of your lives?” I barked to the first-born toes. “Because unless we get rid of Toey, we’re going to look like we’re on military parade every time we go outside.”
None of the others were any help, though. The real toes huddled to the east of Toey, as if afraid of what he might do next.
People started asking me about it. They’d watch me trying to reef big boots on but they wouldn’t say anything until I allowed that Toey was a real nuisance and I was thinking of having him removed from service, so to speak. This was generally met with frowns. One friend even advised that I wouldn’t be able to stand on tiptoes ever again, if I removed the offender. Something about having the foot bones broken and then the surgeon shoving a wire up through the big toe to make it stand at attention again. They wouldn’t break your foot for this, would they?
I consulted a podiatrist who gravely assured me that yes – in most cases — that’s how a surgeon was able to mould your foot into a thing of beauty again, by breaking it first. Surely, he jested. I paid the podiatrist his $180 dollar fee and backed out of his office, vowing never to return.
A quick consult with Dr. Google when I got home proved the man right. Broken. Foot. Bones.
I watched my sister pull on her spiffy ankle boots when she was leaving my home recently. They had to be a size minus two, hardly big enough for a child. Narrow and dainty, like the slippers of a fairy queen, they were a sight to behold. I oohed and ahhed and then rasped to my original left toes: “You see what you could look like if you’d overthrow that reigning monster and just be yourselves again?” Yes, I had narrow foot envy and no wonder.
I sat on the edge of my bed staring at the shoe selection I’d been reduced to since Toey the 6th took control. I’d been through worse things than a broken foot. Joint replacements, root canals, and organ removals, so what was a tiny broken bone in a lower extremity at my age? Before I lost my nerve, I emailed the surgeon’s office and asked to book a date to banish Toey the 6th from my foot forever.
“Who?” the administrative assistant emailed back to me: “We only do feet. If you want the mental health wing it’s in the building behind the hospital. You’d need a new referral for that.”
New referral, my foot.
Connie Cook (she/her) is a freelance writer who resides near beautiful Georgian Bay. She is a beta reader for authors in her area and has had her work featured in anthologies and ezines such as Flash Fiction and Every Day Fiction. She is currently working on her first mystery-romance novel.
Aging and some of its unwanted, inevitable changes
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