Fat feet

At my fattest, and unfittest, I had fat feet.

I guess my circulation, and my heart, were a bit wrecked. Fluid was accumulating down there and making them swell. I also had, sometimes, a kind of weeping thing on the front of my right calf, just dribbling out a clear fluid all the time. Goodness knows how bad it had got. The dread words “heart failure” would creep into my mind and I would push them away.

I never did anything about it because I was so ashamed of how I had become, so fearful of the reproachful comments and little lectures, that I didn’t want to see my GP. I didn’t want to hear what they might say, either, to be officially unwell. On the rare occasions I did see them, it was startling how little they cared. They seemed hostile and indifferent, and I can understand why. They were looking at someone with a self-inflicted condition and even when I was asking for help they had little to offer. But my fat feet would have sucked me into the system and I was too scared.

Fat feet were the low point. They helped me begin to turn things around, a bit. Even after I came back from that brink, managed to lose some weight (although still very obese) and get a little fitter, my feet were still a bit funny. I still had odd kind of brown blotchy stains on the skin on my feet and they stayed there for years and years. I even pointed them out to a doctor once and he shrugged. So I ignored them, and only noticed much more recently that they had finally gone.

I have horrible feet with horrible nails and hard skin and prominent veins, but they’re fit feet.