I have been working on moving my toes. Today I am three and a half weeks in and I can move my big toe. I can bend it a little and move it in toward my other toes. I have been using Epson salt in my bath and putting lotion on my foot. Doing good. Two more weeks of not walking!!

Post Surgery 2 weeks

I reached my two week mark and got my stitches out. The Doctor said to wait 24 hours before I get my foot wet. The incision is healing really well. My foot has started to swell a little at night. I have been loosening my boot and bandages at night. Night time is the hardest.  My foot aches and I can't fall asleep until I'm exhausted. The Doctor told me to wrap my big toe to the toe next to it. He is worried that my big toe might separate away from my other toes. The ligaments can loosen and cause separation. Hopefully wrapping it will help.

It has been 2 and a half weeks and I finally washed my foot. It felt great. My little toe next to my big toe seems to be the most painful. It is bruised up the left side of my toe. I have been jumping around on my left foot to get to and from my scooter. I feel like I bruised or injured my left foot. I would recommend wearing a shoe on the other foot. I wish someone would have warned me. It feels like when I injured my other foot. Hopefully it will heal quickly.

I have been letting my foot breath for awhile each day. It goes numb if I leave it in the boot to long.

 So fare so good. I have 3 and a half weeks until I can walk with the boot. I'm excited to be half way next Tuesday. I have had lots of help and I am thankful for how kind everyone has been. This surgery requires lots of help. It isn't easy to be so limited but I am feeling good about my choice. I have been trying to get out of the house when I can but it is exhausting. It is easier to use the crutches but it's harder on my body. The scooter is hard because I can't do stairs.  The goodnews is that time has gone by quickly. I hope the second half of the 6 weeks is just as fast.

The refining of Kim

This is my list....

I just want to write this down so I can let it free. Growing up I had to deal with Dyslexia. It was hard and humiliating. When I was a Junior in high school my health started going down hill. I had Mono and I kept getting headaches and numbness. I had symtoms for 4 years until suddenly I had the whole bottom half of my body go numb from a stroke. They determined that is was a PFO or a mini stroke because the numbness did not last. After a lot of tests they found i had a hole in my heart. I had PFO surgery to fix the hole when I was 20. No noticeable permanent damage was done. I had my Galbladder die when I was 24 so it had to be removed. It took 9 months of me throwing up to figure out that it was my galbladder. I then started getting dizzy spells. I would wake up from sleeping dizzy. It was hell. It would take me hours to not feel sick and I would have a hard time going back to sleep. The doctors thought it might be a second whole in my heart. After a failed second PFO surgery I decided to see if my dizziness had anything to do with my constant sinus infections. I would get one every couple of months. I went to an allergist and I was allergic to 61 out of 61 on the test. It was the only test I would pass 100% without studying. I now have to take a zertec and use Flonase everyday. As long as I do that I do not get dizzy. Now we get to my knee. After years of not feeling quite right I started to feel really good. I started to exercise again. I decided to do a half marathon. I was hooked on running and i learned to love it again. One day i felt pain in my knee. I ended up having knee surgery and nerve damage but i could walk. The nerve was smothered by the tissue in my knee and by the time i had nerve release surgery i could barly walk. It took years to regain strength in my leg. My nerve never fully healed though and I couldn't  go back to runnimg. Now I am currently recovering from foot sergery for a dead bone in my foot. Some days i felt like a crazy hypochondriac. My husband and my mom can tell you first hand how fun all of this was for everyone involved. I am on my 2nd week of 6 weeks completely off of my foot and It has given me time to think. I have been very blessed with a forgetful disposition. I don't dwell on negative things very long. I have been depressed after each of my kids but is was not a normal state for me. With my baby girl it took me 9 months before I could function normally. I know that depression is not a choice because I have been in the middle of it and it doesn't work that way. I am extremely grateful that I have been given my sanity during most of my trails. I normally don't dwell on the past but I want to give each experience it's place. It has built my character. I am stronger for it and I can emerge from the ashes again. I lay these burdens down. I no longer want to carry them. I let them build up my character but i will drop their weight by the wayside. I will be greatful for the amazing life I have with three beautiful children and my best friend and husband of 13 years. Even with these challenges, life has been good to me and I will not let myself forget that. And now I put an end to my dramatics.

I found a Orthopedic specialist that i trust. His name is Dr. Saltzman. He is the head of Orthopedic Medicine at the University or Utah. I met with him and he gave me a second opinion on my foot. He agreed that my tibial sesmoid bone had died from avascular necrosis. He pointed out to me that the top part of the bone had already disconnected from the bone. There is a small chance that the bone could heal but there are no definitive findings and I would have to not be active for a full year to see if it would heal. Because part of the bone was already falling apart I decided to have surgery July 5th 2016.

As a side note: I am so glad I didn't go with the first doctor I talked to. He was going to do the surgery from the top of my foot and he would have mutilated it. When I told Dr. Saltzman what the other sergeon planned on he agreed it would not have been a good choice.

Surgery went well. My foot pain was minor compared to what I had expected. I traveled from Salt Lake to Grand Junction CO immediately after surgery. I actually felt great.  I had to stop every 50 minutes to walk around on crutches and I had to pee a lot. I am guessing they pumped me full of saline. I regretted how active I was one the ride home the next day. Note to self, do not go flying around on crutches when you are as high as a kite. My arms and chest where sore for days.
The hardest part of the surgery for me are the restrictions they have given me. Before surgery I was planning on two weeks no walking and an additional 6 weeks walking with a boot. Because of not having sufficient tissue on the bottom of my foot I have to stay off of my foot for 6 weeks and then walk with the boot for an additional 4 weeks. It is a little discouraging to have it change so dramatically. I also can't drive for 6 weeks because it was my right foot that was worked on. I have three kids and there summer for the next six weeks is going to be a struggle.

It has been a week and I am feeling good. Sleeping is a struggle in my boot. It is hard to get comfortable. I stopped taking the narcotics a day after I got home. Motrin was enough to help with the pain. I left my foot completely alone for the first 3 days. On day 4 I felt like my foot was swelling and I loosened the bandage a bit to help with comfort. Today I finally changed the bandage and packing for the first time and i took a look at my incision. It looks way worse than I thought it would be.  I thought it would be smaller. Overall I have had a good experience. Having crutches and a knee scooter have helped tremendously.

From Bad Knee to Avascular Necrosis of the Sesamoid Bone (How Did I End Up Here???)

To document my journey I want to start from the beginning. Five years ago in 2012 I was training for my first half marathon, the Provo half. My best friends and I committed to run the race together and we began training. I loved to run. My preferred workout was running 3 miles whenever I was needing a good cardio work out. I hadn't tried long distant running yet, but I was excited to push myself. I was a couple months into training and my next run on my training schedule was a 8 mile run. We were camping up at Mount Pleasant that weekend and I enjoyed an awesome run and some nice outdoor scenery. At the end of my run I did some sprinting to help increase my speed and it all felt amazing. The next day I had another run scheduled and I started running excited and ready to enjoy my run. I was about a mile into running when I felt my knee give out. It wouldn't hold my weight and I had to call my husband to come and rescue me.

I iced my knee and rested it for a week, hoping that it would heal quickly and I could resume my training. At first I was very hopeful. I would run 3 to 5 miles before my knee would give out again. Slowly the length of my runs got shorter and shorter. I realized that the half marathon was not going to happen and I decided to find a doctor to investigate what was wrong with my knee. The first doctor I saw couldn't find anything wrong. He gave me a cortisone shot in the wrong spot on my knee and told me he couldn't do anything except experimental surgery. Needless to say I looked for someone more experienced with running injuries. I found an amazing doctor Dr. Toronto at the Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City. He diagnosed my injury as a pinched nerve. I had extra tissue in my knee that would expand when I ran and it would pinch my Peroneal Nerve on the Left side of my knee. My  low point was the day I was walking to pick up my kindergartner from school and my knee gave out three times. The school was only one block away. Dr. Toronto recommended Dr. Cooley (he was the doctor that did Tiger Woods knee surgery). He was the best option I had to fix my knee. I met with him and scheduled a nerve release surgery at the Park City Medical Center. The surgery went well and I felt some hope that I would be able to return to my normal activities.

Trying to run after I couldn't use my left leg for so long proved to be difficult. I spent many hours crying over my week leg. I had no muscle left and I knew if I wanted to do anything I needed to rebuild it. A couple of my running friends told me about the book Born To Run. I loved this book. I had always loved to run and I indeed felt like I was "born to do run". From that point on I did everything barefoot. I felt like it was a way to change my knee and maybe change the way I was running enough to help my knee rework its mechanics. I bought a stationary bike and I found TRX. I slowly rebuilt my leg. It took me two years to do a normal squat, but I was so proud when I did it. I even had a friend make me a pair of huarache's. Yea barefoot sandal's.

I felt hope for the first time in years. I wanted to make some goals and to keep progressing. I decided to train for a half marathon again. I wish that this story had a happy ending. I got up to 6 miles and I started to have nerve issues. My foot would go numb for days after I ran. I cried some more and realized that if I wanted to prevent nerve damage I needed to give up my old love. The last race I did was a Valentines Day 10 k fun run. It was humiliating. I used to be a fast runner. I could outrun all of the boys in elementary school. The last race I did I had to walk most of it and I wanted to scream at how unfair it was that I had permanent damage.

That is when I found P90X. I fell in love with the program. Tony was what I was looking for. I did the original P90X for two months and really enjoyed it. We went on vacation for a week and I decided to instead of finishing the original program I would try P90X3. It is a 30 minute program and 30 minutes was the perfect amount of time for me. I finished P90X3 and I felt amazing. I lost 8 pounds, could do a real pull-up and push-ups were easy. I felt strong and fulfilled for the first time since the day of my knee injury. When I finished I sent in my pictures to Beach Body and I got my free t-shirt. It was a proud moment for me.

I had always enjoyed climbing and I felt so good that I wanted to try going to the climbing gym. I had build up my arm muscles and I felt like I had found my calling. I did P90X3 and would go climbing twice a week. When I started climbing I would climb until I couldn't use my arms anymore. I would drive home with T-rex arms and loved ever minute of the pain. For my birthday I got my own climbing gear. I was really happy.

At the end of October 2015 I somehow injured my foot. I don't remember a particular moment. There are three way it could have happened. First, I was doing Insanity at the time, barefoot as usual and I could have developed a stress fracture. Second, I had talked to some other climbers about my technique and I was focusing a lot on using my feet on the wall. Third, I was driving from Grand Junction, CO to Salt Lake City, Utah and I was stuck in traffic for over two hours. When I arrived at my mom's house I could't bend my toes down. They where stuck in a flexed position.

I rested my foot for a couple of weeks and tried to find non-impact ways to work out. I put my climbing membership on hold in December 2015 because we were going to be gone for two weeks during Christmas. I was planning on starting back to the gym after the holidays. Throughout December My foot would ache but it wasn't all the time. I decided to do P90X3 again in January instead of climbing because my foot still bothered me. Now this is proof that I have a high pain tolerance.  I finished two months of the program. I modified some of the moves if it required to much presser on my foot. The straw that broke the camels back was our 10 day trip to Disneyland and the Grand Canyon. We where walking 10 to 13 miles a day and my foot was in excruciating pain by the time we came home. I couldn't walk with out limping and babying my foot.

That week I went to a local Podiatrist. He took some x-rays and gave me a cortisone shot on the top of my foot. The shot was terrible. I felt a pop when the needle went in. The x-ray showed two hair-line fractures and maybe a cyst. I went a couple of weeks to see if the shot would work. I also got orthodontic's to help make my foot more comfortable. The shot helped but after a while the pain came back. I went back for a follow up appointment and the Doctor ordered a MRI. A week later I was sitting in his office waiting to find out what the MRI showed.

There where two things he prepared me for. The first was a bone spur, the second was a cyst. Nothing could have prepared me for what he said. The MRI showed a black sesamoid bone. The bone was dead. Somehow the blood supply to the bone was cut off and my bone had been decaying over the last eight months. Well.....That explains why it hurts so much. The technical term is Avascular Necrosis of the Sesamoid Bone.

The Doctor told me that I could wait for the bone to decompose and see if it still hurts (this could take years). Or I could have surgery. I scheduled surgery for the next Friday. Now, I have to stress that the doctor did not tell me a lot about my condition. He made it sound like a normal everyday procedure. When I went home and googled the crap out of AVN of the sesamoid bone I realized what I was up against. I couldn't find anyone who would recommend having it done.

After a while I found a blog http://taylorjustbeingreal.blogspot.com/. She had a positive experience and was pain free. I also found out that my previous neighbor had Sesamoidectomy surgery on both of her feet and she is pain free as well. I am trying to decide if I should have surgery. I need to find a Doctor with a high success rate that I can trust. The hardest part of this week has been dealing with the loss of my identity. I was beginning to see myself a certain way. I couldn't be a runner anymore but I could be strong and I could climb. I am heart broken and torn. I have to decided if I want to spend two months on crutches and 6 months healing from a surgery that might work. I also have to suffer the loss of another part of me that I loved. These are things that brought me true joy. The kind that make your soul fly higher and your mind and body happy. I have suffered this loss before. It is crushing. It suffocates and kills a part of me.

I can't help but fight to be positive. That is who I am. I look at what I have left and I make changes and adapt. I always look for the good. Right now I am sad, I am grieving and I am scared but I will find a solution and I will find myself again.