Friends of the right and the left…

I speak tonight about the condition of the left in my world. But I will start with the conclusion.

The state of the bunion is good. And there is no reason to think that it will grow any worse during the next year.

The bunion first appeared on the inside side of my left foot sometime between thirty and forty years ago. I did not know it was a bunion, because at the time I had no idea what a bunion was. I just thought my foot was acting a bit weird, swelling a bit at the side toward the front, becoming a little red, sometimes sore to the touch. But it did not seem like a bite or anything like that. It just seemed like my foot bone.

Now, you who do not know, ask. What is a bunion? According to Google AI, a bunion is: “a painful, bony bump at the base of the big toe caused by misalignment of the metatarsophalangeal joint, forcing the toe toward the others.”

At some point after my strange condition first appeared, I learned that I had a bunion. I don’t remember exactly how I learned it was a bunion, but it seemed weird to me because if you had asked me what a bunion was, I would have told you something much different. Not that I know what I would have said, but I would have probably come up with something more like a callous or something. But the bunion itself isn’t a new something that appears on your foot. It’s just that one part of your foot changes shape.

It didn’t take long for me to learn that my bunion decided to hurt, especially when I wore certain of my shoes that rubbed against it. And when I said it hurt, it wasn’t like a slight discomfort but a sharp pain, a shooting pain. I quickly learned to avoid certain shoes, those that were narrow, or whose leather was particularly stiff.

At some point, I went to a podiatrist. I don’t remember who he was or where his office was, but he told me that my bunion would not disappear, that it might grow and get more sore, and that while I could get by for a while, that eventually I would need surgery to repair it.

I remember asking him that, if I was eventually going to need surgery, why should I wait until it gets worse? Shouldn’t I get it now? He told me that I could certainly do that, and that some people would do that, but that others would wait until some time later. Then I asked him the possible downsides of surgery.

He told me that there were many. Assuming that he did not operate on the wrong foot (he had never done that yet), he might bungle the surgery, there might be an infection, it might not work, or even if it does, that the bunion might reappear and that more surgery might be needed, and that the recovery might be long, painful and slow. It was a different speech than I heard from my eye doctor, who would give me a list of all the things that could go seriously wrong with my cataract, by ending with the words “but you are more likely to be hurt driving to the surgery center before the procedure”.

I never saw the podiatrist again, although I left his office knowing that some time, some time soon perhaps, I would have to have the surgery. But I learned that, by not wearing shoes that made my foot ache, and instead wearing shoes that were wider and softer, I could walk, run, really do anything, and forget that I even had a bunion. Yes, now and then, I would feel a shot of pain, but it was much less often than I assumed it would be. And it would ease up soon.

I stopped buying expensive dress shoes, and began buying my shoes at Payless, and found their less expensive shoes were often much more comfortable to wear. It was a tragedy in my life (of course, a mild tragedy), when Payless closed their last store in 2004. Since then, most of my shoes have been bought online. Turns out, for the most part, okay.

But last year, I bought a pair of sandals from some company in China, after seeing an ad that intrigued me on Facebook. The sandals took quite some time to arrive (there are reasons to use Amazon, in addition to the reasons not to use Amazon), and they really looked nice when they came. It was spring, 2025, and I started wearing them in place of my aging Rockport XCS sandals.

Unfortunately, I found that, the more I wore the sandals, the more I noticed my bunion, and the soon, it was only that I noticed the bunion, but that the bunion was really bothering me. The strap was wrapped around my foot right on the bunion, and this turned out not to be a good thing. After several weeks, I stopped wearing the sandals, but the pain did not go away. For most of last year’s summer, my bunion really bothered me and I thought, once and for all, I would have to find a new podiatrist and probably have surgery. It was no longer a question only of deciding what shoes to wear. Now, my bunion hurt even when I was barefoot.

In late October, we went to St. Louis for my 65th high school reunion, my foot hurting. I was holding off until this event because one of my closest high school friends has been a podiatrist for the past 60 years (still practicing), and I thought I could get some free advice.

Miracle of miracles, a day or so before the reunion, my bunion stopped hurting. I didn’t even mention my bunion to my old friend Ed because I felt fine. Whatever the Chinese sandals did to the bunion, that was now history.

That was four months ago, and my bunion has not bothered me since.

The state of the bunion is good.

As to the state of the union….