This morning, I’m in my podiatrist’s office. It’s one a series of visits I’ve made over the past couple of weeks to deal with the foot problem that kept me from going to Free Spirit.
As I’m taking off my sneakers, I hear my sock sticking a bit on the inside of the sole. I think, “My socks have been doing that lately. The foot is bandaged. I don’t think anything sticky was in there. Maybe I should check.”
Ten seconds later, the doctor walks into the office. I look at him and say, “You’re not going to friggin’ believe this.” I show him the head of the screw embedded in the sole of the sneaker. The point of the screw is what my socks have been sticking to… and clearly the cause of the foot problem.
Why is this a pleasure?
It means that my setting up the tent, and my testing my air mattress, and any number of other things were not the cause of my foot injury. It was an 1-1/4 inch wood screw that penetrated the sole of my sneaker, the custom insoles, and my thick socks that caused the problem.
It means that camping is no longer out of the question for me. It means that, potentially, I can go to Free Spirit next year. (Though my podiatrist is not enthusiastic about the idea.)
That leaves the mystery of how the screw got in there in the first place. It was seriously embedded in the sneaker. The doctor had to use a screwdriver and pliers to get it out. It’s as if it were screwed into my sneaker deliberately.
Outside of my home and my podiatrist’s office, there are only a couple of place at which I generally take off my footwear. At neither location is there anyone pranksterish enough to do such a thing for a laugh.
So I’ll just chalk it up that as something that just happened somehow.
As for the screw: my doctor is adding it to his collection of “weird stuff collected from patient’s feet.”
Originally published at Argothald. You can comment here or there.