Wednesday I went back to the podiatrist I have been seeing about my foot pain, ankle pain, and the burning pain where my leg meets my foot. I found out I need an ankle replacement, which is major surgery.

My ankle bone will be removed. The whole thing. It has huge lesions, so the doctor doesn’t think it is salvageable. It will be replaced with a synthetic bone substitute around which my natural bone is supposed to grow. Additionally, he said that the pain where my leg meets my foot, that burning pain I’ve had for years, is likely because the bottom of my leg bone (and I forget which one), also has lesions on it where it meets the ankle. That will likely have to be filled in.

I really like this doctor and he seems very knowledgeable, catching several problems that the doctors I saw in Virginia did not catch. He gave me a copy of the MRI results and showed me on a model of the bone what he was talking about and how big the lesions were. They really do take up pretty much the whole bone. It’s possible that some of the bone is even dead. I am still getting second opinion from another doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon, just to make sure there are no other options that maybe my doctor didn’t think of. This doctor has a different specialty, he’s an orthopedic surgeon, so he may have a different perspective. But looking at the MRI paperwork and having been shown on a model of the bone what’s going on, I really don’t think that the other doctor is going to have a different opinion. If he does have a different opinion I don’t think it will be drastically different.

If in fact his opinion is drastically different I won’t even know what to do. They’re both doctors. They both do Foot and Ankle surgeries. The doctor I’m currently seeing has tons of good reviews and the doctor on getting a second opinion from doesn’t really have any reviews. On a bright note that means he doesn’t have any bad reviews, at least not that I was able to find, but he doesn’t have any good ones either to let me know that he’s reliable. If he tells me my phone is salvageable and that I don’t need to do the surgery, will I believe him? I would like to believe him because the surgery is going to be agonizing, but I’m being cautious too. For years I have tried to get this foot fixed. I’ve had two surgeries on it already. I had a bone infection in my foot to go with it all. I want whatever I do to be the last surgery on my foot. If that means going through a terrible surgery as opposed to a milder one, it’s probably worth doing just to make sure that I can go back to living my life the way I used to and taking long walks. I just want this to be over. So if the doctor giving me a second opinion suggests not doing surgery or suggests a drastically different surgery, I’m really going to have to weigh my options and think about the different explanations both of them gave. I would rather do a terrible surgery now and have it over with then try a milder surgery and find out it didn’t really work and then have to do the terrible surgery. I don’t want to be laid up any longer than I have to be. So what I need is either for the doctors to be on the same page, or for this doctor giving me the second opinion to have a really good explanation of a better alternative. I so hope there is another way. Having an entire bone of my body literally just removed sounds terrible, and it probably doesn’t sound half as terrible as it actually is.

I have been asking people on Foot and Ankle pages how bad the pain for the surgery is. Very few people have had the surgery as drastically as the first doctor says I need to do it. Of those who have done it or have done something similar, it’s unanimous that the pain is so bad that you don’t sleep for days. One person compared the pain to having been put through a meat grinder. If you know me, you know I am a total sissy. I feel like running at the very thought of doing this. I just don’t know what else to do. I’ve got to fix my foot.