2012 – Year of the Bunionectomy

Have I mentioned how annoying it is watching your body fall apart after age sixty? Oh, that’s right. I do it all the time.

My personal illusion of immortality was shaken this week when I had to schedule a bunionectomy on my right foot, the result of a lifelong addiction to improper footwear.

When I was young, I thought only hillbillies living in the Ozarks and walking around shoeless eleven months of the year got bunions. Am I related to Li’l Abner? No, I am not. But it turns out that shoeless people are probably the ones least likely to have bunions. Them and the women who wear wide, sensible shoes with thick rubber soles. Walk around in pointy-toed heels for forty-five years or so and see what happens.

A bunion is not an out-of-control callus. It is a cuneiform bone deformed by years of pressure, not unlike the ancient Chinese practice of foot-binding deplored by enlightened people everywhere. I don’t know if that particular form of torture is still going on in a remote geisha house somewhere, but I do know you’d have a hard time getting young women in America to part with their fashionable 6-inch heels. This is not an exaggeration; high-heeled shoes today are six inches and higher. It is a mystery how anyone wearing them stays upright and mobile.

I’d tell them… Keep it up. One day an unfeeling podiatrist will be sawing off part of your foot and sticking a pin in it to keep your toes from falling off… but they wouldn’t listen, and I couldn’t blame them. I have a closetful of cute shoes I intend to wear again, yes, I do.

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Photos: Google Images, orientvisual.com, parentingclan.com
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