Getting ready to leave
Once I was accepted for an internship, I went ahead and decided I also wanted a short, three day vacation before going to live in London. I had been taking French in college and I had been to Paris once before, but not since I had started to French. I wanted to try it out. (Disclaimer: I’m terrible at speaking French)
So, I (my parents) bought me a ticket to Paris and the Eurostar over to London.
Two weeks before I was supposed to leave, I got the most horrible pain in my right leg. It was difficult to explain it. It felt numb when I was sitting down, as if it had fallen asleep, and was throbbing, but it didn’t hurt. Until I would stand up. You know when your leg wakes up from being asleep and it feels like pins and needles, but doesn’t necessarily hurt? Yeah, take that pain times 100.
Eventually, I had my mom take me to urgent care and they took x-rays. Apparently I had a cyst or a fracture (they couldn’t tell) on the top of my foot that was draining fluid up my leg toward my thigh. The nurse had horrible bedside manner and started freaking out telling us we needed to go visit an orthopedic surgeon and find out what was really going on.
So we made a consult appointment that day before he was supposed to go into surgery, but we were cutting it close. His assistant relayed the information and x-rays to him and then came back to us to say what was going on.
No big deal. Just wear a boot to take the pressure off.
So I did. And it just made it worse. We didn’t go back in because I figured out that if I walked on it, it actually felt better. As if it were helping the fluid drain more. It felt like the more I stayed still or put the boot on, it kept the fluid from draining and it felt like it was building up.
That moment was so scary. I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to go; that I would have to have surgery and I’d be in a cast for months. I was so thankful that it wasn’t an immediate threat and that it was more or less solved and I could go to my internship!
I did take the boot with me just in case though. And because I had so much to take with me, I couldn’t pack the boot, so I had to wear it on the plane and all the way to my hotel. But more on that in Part 2: Paris. ❤
Adventuresome Nicole 