Some Assembly Required

Fifteen days out, and the menu just grew. I laid out the five-job rebuild earlier this week and figured the order was locked. It wasn’t. Dr. Stein added another course: a conservative bunionectomy. Make it six jobs, one anesthesia bill.

Here’s the logic, and it’s annoyingly sound. The big bunion isn’t just sitting there looking ugly. It’s the reason my hammertoe formed in the first place. The whole joint has drifted sideways and is crowding into the second toe’s space. Fix the hammertoe without dealing with the bunion, and two things happen: the toe slowly bends itself right back, and there may not even be enough room in there to do the repair properly. Pull the big toe back to straight-ish and suddenly there’s elbow room. More working space, a cleaner fix, a better outlook ten years from now.

The cost of all that elbow room is, predictably, more hardware. My right foot is shaping up to be a value-sized pack of picture-hanging hardware. You know the one from Home Depot: the jumbo assortment with enough screws and anchors to hang everything from a 3x5 photo to a 40-pound wall sculpture. The photo up top is my actual left foot, six weeks after surgery, before the bone had started fusing back together under weight-bearing. The back of my right foot is headed for the exact same look: same hardware, same gnarliness.

And that’s just the rear of the foot. There’s more going in up at the toes, partly to keep company with the hardware that’s already lived there since a conservative bunionectomy back in 2017. I’ll dig up some images of what the toe bones are in for and post them when I find them. Consider this your warning.

I am genuinely fine with adding the bunionectomy because I am never doing this again. (Probably. Hopefully. Ask me in a year.) If he’s already in there with the drill out, he may as well do every last thing that keeps me off his table for good.

That is more than enough surgical bullshit for one day. I’m going to go soothe my soul the only responsible way I know: a sleeve of absurdly good brown sugar pancake oreos that taste like the inside of a fancy latte. They’ve earned a spot in the Fun Stuff.

Foot tomorrow. Cookies now.