Big Toe Woe

My mother doesn’t think I’m old enough to have arthritis. Now my mother is 98 3/4 but thinks of herself as about 75. She thinks of me as, well, if not six, then about 30. No matter what she thinks, I do have arthritis. I have it in my big toe. It doesn’t bother me often, but, when it does, let’s just say it’s difficult to avoid your big toe.

I have a friend who is an arthritis expert, and among the advice she has given me, she says to cut out carbonated beverages and to massage the arthritic area to break down the offending crystals.

I say, “No diet root beer? NO DIET ROOT BEER?” It’s not that I don’t already know carbonated beverages are bad for you and that diet drinks are worse, it’s just that I will really be a grumpier person without my diet root beer. Now, however, I am committed to, if not cutting it out altogether, then cutting way back. The only thing I might substitute for rootbeer is wine, and while a glass of wine may be good for me, substituting 2 or 3 glasses for the equal amount of diet root beer will not only leave me not grumpy, it will leave me comatose.

Then there’s the massage part. This is my big toe where it meets the ball of the foot. It’s difficult to get a grip on. And sometimes massaging it hurts. However, I also love, love, love my ballet classes (subject for a whole new blog entry), and so you may picture me in front of The Big Bang Theory, foot torked onto my lap, offending toe trying to escape it's fubdown. We’ll see how this goes.

I should tell you that concurrently with starting this blog, my mother (she of giant personality) has quit teaching tap dancing and entered Hospice care. (Well, my sibs and I always knew these two events would go hand in hand.) This is perhaps not the optimum time to begin a blog, but, then again, maybe it is.