My Ankles: What's Up With Them All of a Sudden?
It started almost a year ago. I was getting dressed to go do some Thanksgiving-related shopping and my ankles were so swollen I couldn't put my boots on. It was weird, but it was neither painful nor disabling so I just put on some low-profile shoes instead. In a few hours, the swelling was gone. When you're this age, random body things just happen sometimes, for no apparent reason, and usually they go away.
It happened once or twice more in 2021. That I noticed. Hey, how often do you notice your ankles, if they're doing their job and don't hurt? Most able-bodied people take their ankles for granted and I am no exception.
I was no exception. Over the course of the winter, the ankle swelling happened more and more often and got more and more extreme, extending down into my feet. Sometimes I couldn't wear the good sandals with the ankle straps. In April I bought a second pair of sandals in a flip-flop style, two sizes larger than my usual, for days when none of my normal footwear fit. By the last week in June, the swelling was constant and the flip-flops were the only ones I could wear.
I was also losing mobility and stamina. Stairs became a problem. Bending over more than momentarily became a problem. Walking six blocks left me feeling wiped out. And, oh by the way, there's been weight gain. I had been gaining about ten pounds a year for the previous few years and I figured, okay, I'm going through a period of weight gain like I did around menopause and at some point I'll plateau, like I did then. But this year I gained 17 pounds between September and June. (It's probably been more since then.) I had to do clothing triage and donate a bunch of items to a thrift shop because they were too small, then go around to the retail part of the same business and search, search, search for something that fit because I was (am) past large, past extra large, into 2X and 3X territory where pretty much everything is hard to find.
By that time I was in Taos and my life was, for the time being, stable, so I made a medical appointment. In this town, doctors' time is so scarce that I saw an PA, not an MD. The PA ordered a bunch of tests that allowed her to rule out the more serious possibilities. It's not my heart, not my liver, not my kidneys. She had me try a diuretic, which had such horrible side effects that I only lasted a few days on it, and one good trick: propping up my legs while I slept so the fluid could drain. When I slept with my ankles higher than my heart, they'd start the morning nearly back to normal. Then during the first couple of hours I was vertical, they'd swell up again, to the point where my ankle bones were lost from view.
I also paid a yoga teacher to design a custom exercise routine that worked around all my new limitations. This was when I discovered that I had lost range of motion in my ankles, not because of anything happening to the joint itself, but because my skin was stretched so tight. I couldn't point my toes, and that was huge for me because of my childhood ambition to be a dancer. As long as I could point my toes like a ballerina, I thought I was still basically okay. But now that was gone - except first thing in the morning, when the swelling was down.
That was as far as we got before I left Taos. I really didn't expect any more progress until I got back to Massachusetts. But then, when I was laid over for a few days in a yurt in the Missouri Ozarks, there was a cold snap, 23° F, a little preview of January in mid-October. I had planned to go grocery shopping, but I did not have appropriate clothing to go out in that. So I stayed in and lived on leftovers, mainly a shrimp gumbo that I had made at my previous Airbnb, and snacks, mainly cashews and unsweetened chocolate.
About mid-afternoon I noticed: my ankles weren't swollen. They looked like they did first thing in the morning, and I'd been up for hours.
So this is a food issue?
Another ^&<@%$#!* food issue?!? Like I needed another one?!?
But wait. This is good. I know what to do about food issues. I even have an app on my phone that I can use to track my diet and my symptoms and, after accumulating a couple of months of data, it will find correlations. And I have a baseline: cashews, unsweetened chocolate, and the ingredients in the gumbo (shrimp, okra, onions, garlic, red bell peppers, clam juice, chicken broth, coconut oil, various herbs and spices including a premixed Cajun blend, salt, and a little tapioca starch for thickening). I can start with the baseline and gradually add in more items, maybe one or two a week, until I pinpoint the source of the trouble.
I can test a few foods now, in this little window of time before the holidays. During the holidays and immediately afterward, while I'm on the road, I'll have a hard enough time sticking to the diet I already know I'm supposed to be on.
After the holidays I am returning to New Mexico. Las Cruces through the winter and then Taos again in the spring. I'll have a kitchen, and both those towns have natural food stores. I'll be able to do some serious self-research.
Update: it's eggs.
Eggs. I've been eating eggs pretty much all my life. How is it that suddenly they're causing a problem they've never caused before?
That's a rhetorical question. Bodies do weird things. Bodies over 60 are especially prone to doing weird things. Food sensitivities come and go.
So now I look around for egg substitutes and drop a few recipes out of my repertoire and I keep a hopeful eye out for health improvements over the next several months.