My experiences with the doctor in the hospital in Rotterdam were quite disappointing. Luckily, the waiting list on another hospital got shorter every week, and after two months finally I arrived at the city of Woerden, at the best orthopaedic and rheumatic centre of the Netherlands.
The doctor walked towards me, with a broad smile and an extended hand. “Hi!”, she said, and wasted no time by immediately starting asking questions: “Why are you here? I can see you already visited a doctor who gave you a diagnosis, so what can I do for you then?”
I told her my story: how I was full of doubts and insecurities after returning from Beijing, how my experience with the doctor in Rotterdam was disappointing, how I was not yet fine with the message that ‘nothing can be done on your situation’ and how I still had no idea what I could expect in the nearer and farther future, which kept me from making life plans.
The doctor listened visibly surprised by the acts of her ‘colleague’ but seemed without judgement about my story. She had a sincere and ’no-nonsense’ vibe coming off of her. She just said: “Well, let's take a look then, starting with new X-Ray pictures and a fresh MRI, since this one you have brought me from Beijing is already a few months old."
“REALLY?!” I thought, almost ecstatic. The first thing she does is the one thing I wished the other doctor had done for me. I started feeling hopeful again and knew that even if her treatment plan would be the same as the one before (ie, ’there’s nothing we can do for you’), I would at least feel heard.
So then and there I was scheduled for some tests, and a few weeks later I would return to her office to hear the verdict.
Nervously, I listened: “I’ve found no necrosis, although I can imagine the other doctors making this mistake. It really does look similar! But when I look at the X-Ray I noticed something weird.”
Here she showed me a picture on her computer of my ankle.
[This is the first post on Steemit where I don't add a picture I took myself. It is however, a picture from my private collection ;-)]
“See? Something seems to stick out on your bone, almost as if a part of the bone got busted. It’s not broken but definitely looks like a little hook sticking out.”
I looked at the X-Ray. An untrained eye can barely distinguish anything on a picture like this. It’s all greys and whites, but indeed, something seemed to stick out of the talus bone of my foot.
She then explained to me what this meant: the sticking part of the bone got damaged, probably from trauma. I immediately knew when and what happened, since I’d experienced my first pains on steps of stairs in Russia.
This ‘hook’ on my bone is just a tiny tiny thing, but apparently this ’scrapes’ off the cartilage in the other bone opposite of the talus. This causes nasty pains, since cartilage is needed to prevent the harder ‘original’ bones to rub onto each other.
In the end, all this sticking and scraping hurting caused damage also known as arthrosis in the left foot.
“Can this piece of bone be removed?”, me and my boyfriend asked, surprised by the sudden change in diagnosis, and therefore again hopeful. This story seemed way less daunting then necrosis, which you could also describe as… ‘dead bone’. A little hook on a bone seemed way more innocent.
Unfortunately, the little hook appeared to be a wolf in sheep clothing. To even reach this little hook in the middle of many other bones the risk of damaging more bones and causing even more arthrosis… Was not an option.
The only solution for now was and is: prevent the whole foot from ‘unrolling’. The scraping of the hook would be less, which meant all the bruising and cartilage damage could ‘heal’, which would lessen my pain.
The End! You would think. But I would return to the doctor soon…
All pictures on steemit.com/@soyrosa are created and edited by me, Rosanne Dubbeld, 2001-2018. Contact me if you want to discuss licensing or collaborations on creative projects :-)