Clearly God was in control. Not only was I able to get the 5:40am bus ON TIME to be at the hospital…but my attending nurse happened to live where? In the Haight. Where? On Clayton. Which part of Clayton? Between Haight & Waller. That would be 639 Clayton. That would be our old place. As Ginny Bunnell used to ask: “Coinkidinky?”

Signing all of the pre-op ‘releases’ certainly drives home the seriousness of surgery. No wonder I kept confusing anaesthesia with anethenasia….glad it was the former…though the reluctance I had to come “out” of it after the surgery led me to believe they may have goofed a bit. My first post-op memory was looking into my inquiring doc’s face and then down at my toes and pointing sternly at them and asking defiantly, “why are they still crooked?”

After all of that hoopla, I wanted beautifully straight toes. But the surgical booties can hide a lot – the good, along with the ugly (Frankensteinian stitches and pins that I woudl later see -fortunately, however, this ugly involved no “bad” in between!).

or: what my life has been about for the past ~month. Today marks Week Three + 2 days post-op of me deciding to go under the knife.

This is the culmination of a long road: it started with my grandmother…Gramma Brown….who always wore pumps and had the worst bunions ever. Somehow I took up the mantle – I swear it was when I wore those tight Jack Purcell sneakers when I was like 5 – and have had these charming projections from my feet ever since. When my co-worker Gina had the procedure done, I was curious.

I went to her doctor (having felt comfortable that I could ride off of her prodigious due diligence) and he used his standard M.O: don’t be knife-happy. Take preventitive steps and monitor. I did…got orthotics…new orthotics…and then finally, about 1.5 years later, he proudly pronounced that I was getting to an “advanced” stage. One of those rare situations where “advanced” is not a badge of honor.

Sadly my own experience corroborated this: I was starting to feel pain, despite my religious foot massages every night (ask my former roomies: they’ll tell you I worked my toes for ten minutes regardless of what was going on!), it was time to accept the fact, suck it up and do it. Stay tuned….