Gout is a form of arthritis that happens when your kidneys don’t do a good enough job getting the urea out of your blood and the stuff starts to crystalize in a joint. That triggers a cascading reaction as swelling brings more blood and urea.
I think I was suffering from various gout spots for nearly a decade. I remember back in 2008 when I was building out my darkroom, my ankle began to hurt like crazy and I did not know why. I assumed I must have jumped down from a ladder and maybe hurt it, or something, and wrapped it up with an ace bandage and stumped around, whining under my breath. I didn’t really figure out what was going on until about 2017 when one of my toes suddenly swelled up like a hot dog trying to burst on a barbecue. In fact, it felt like that, too.
For me, dealing with gout is straightforward: I have to keep my weight under 210lbs and I am fine. Also, drink more water, which is a problem because plain water is gross; I always feel like I am going to choke on the stuff. A simple solution is to add a few molecules of crystal light ice tea or punch or something that changes the color and gives it some flavor. Then it’s a “soft drink” and my brain accepts it happily.
That is a remarkably accurate illustration of what it feels like.
The part I really don’t like is how it affects my consciousness. I don’t know if it’s urea in the blood stream or deferred pain, but I feel slow and woozy when the attack comes on.
Long-term, gout sucks. The joints get inflamed and don’t ever go back fully to their original size and position. I have one toe that is pretty much ruined; it’s bigger and more sensitive. I attribute all this stuff to simply having survived nearly 60 years, and this is the price we pay. “It could be worse, lots worse” is my mantra.
There’s some sort of thing that has been going on on the top/arch of my right foot, and it has gotten bigger over years. If I wear tight shoes it gets revenge by getting bigger, too. So I no longer wear cowboy boots, which sucks because I have had quite a collection in my day. Sensible shoes seem to be a part of getting older, but I can’t wear anything until it has been broken in over that spot, which is problematic to say the least. I used to break in shoes by taping a thin piece of curved steel over the parts of my foot I wanted to protect, then putting on socks soaked lightly with vodka, then I’d wear the shoes for a day. That, seriously, does a great job of conforming a pair of shoes to your foot. Now, it just hurts.
Oh yikes that sounds awful. On shoes: I can recommend Ariats. They seem to make them wider than most other brands; for me, I can really and truly put on a brand new pair out of the box and go out hiking, with no blisters at the end of the day. No breaking-in period required. I would suspect it was just me, but I have about two dozen friends who also wear nothing but Ariats and have the same experience… that’s not actually that large of a number of people… but it might be worth a try.
Very good tip on vodka-soaked socks. I did not know that!
@kestrel – also thin poly bags are great for getting feet into and out of tight shoes while breaking them in (or trying on cowboy boots)
My problem is that my feet try to break in, not the boots.
Oh, and some leathers simply do not stretch at all. Stingray, for example. Back in the 90s I had a semi-custom pair of Larry Mahans in black stingray with silver overstitch; they were sized snug but never gave a bit. I wound up trading them to a co-worker for a flat panel (that was when flat panels were heinously expensive) definitely a bad purchasing decision.
Soaking your feet in alcohol: not recommended for smokers or people who work around sources of flame (welding rig, hot forge)
Do you need a water filter? Does carbonation help?
Hydrophobia?!?!
Do tea or (tea-free) herbal infusions cause problems?
I find cold water hard to drink. Room-temperature water, though, is just fine. Tastes of nothing, easy to swallow, and I can down a glassful at a time. I drink tap water, but I use a filter jug to remove the chlorine “flavor”. (They say the filter also removes a bunch of other stuff, including heavy metals, but I take that with a grain of salt. They’re not supposed to be in my drinking water in the first place, anyway. Plus, I use a filter cartridge about three times longer than they recommend. It still works to remove the chlorine smell.)
I haven’t heard of the vodka-socks method before… Is that just a variant on wetting the shoe/boot to stretch it out? (if so, what’s the benefit to using vodka over just water?)
I’ve mostly just broken in boots by wearing them, and then when I get the inevitable blister/hotspot, to pad it with a napkin/tisssue and duct tape it, and then go back to wearing the boots.
My own stereotypes about food are the exact opposite. I already know that I dislike soft drinks, but as long as something is labeled as a “lemonade,” or “fruit juice,” or “tea,” then my brain accepts it happily. A soft drink? Nope, no way.
The way I see, all male footwear qualifies as sensible for me. It’s all incredibly comfortable compared to women’s footwear. Women’s shoes don’t just have too high heels, they are also really tight. I switched to wearing male footwear while living in Germany. When I returned home, my boyfriend and my uncle both asked me whether my new boots that I bought in Germany aren’t too large for me. They were used to seeing me with much smaller shoes/boots. If you think that women’s feet appear small, it’s not always because of them actually being that much smaller than men’s feet. It’s just that women’s shoes are a lot tighter. When I wear male shoes, my feet appear a lot larger than when I wear female shoes (I no longer do the latter, though). Of course, high heels also create an illusion of shorter feet thus contributing to feet appearing visually smaller.
Speaking of really shitty footwear, today I just published an article that discusses those— https://andreasavester.com/history-of-the-always-changing-female-beauty-standards/ It’s funny how writing and thinking about beauty can make me unhappy and sad about the state of humanity.
Sideways tangent – so what happened with your truck and how are the frogs?
Instead of vodka, have you tried glycerin water (~30%)? Glycerin softens leather quite nicely and is also nicer to your skin. From what I’ve read, alcohol actually makes leather more brittle. As ianad, you should probably read up on it yourself.
@7 Andreas Avester: I think men’s and women’s feet must on average actually be different, since I wear a women’s 10 (US), which is about as high as you can get off the shelf, and a men’s 7, which is on the low end of that scale, sometimes the lowest the store carries. That suggests to me that many women would not even be able to find men’s shoes that fit without specially ordering them, and vice versa.
My first thought was sympathy, but I was sure I really had a useful second thought going there until I got to Owlmirror’s comment & saw that tea had been covered.
So, just back to the sympathy! Take care, Marcus.
My sympathies, Marcus. It must be miserable.
Ridana @#8
Sure, I know that, on average, men are bigger than women, which means also larger feet. My point was that men’s and women’s shoes are designed differently, which further accentuates the naturally existing differences. My size 41 women’s shoes visually appear a lot smaller than my size 40 men’s shoes. (It’s European sizes for me.) Women’s shoes are designed to be more form-fitting thus making the feet appear narrower. If they have heels, it also creates the visual illusion of shorter feet. Those are inherent differences in how the shoes are constructed. It’s not just about the actual size of the wearer’s feet. Never mind that women’s shoes are immensely uncomfortable, they are very tight and walking on heels makes your feet hurt.
Yes, this is a real problem for many transgender people. Trans men with small feet cannot always easily find male shoes that are small enough for them. Trans women face the opposite problem with needing female shoes that are large enough for them. This problem is less common for trans people who start taking hormones as teenagers while their bodies are still growing. Personally, I got lucky that my body is pretty big for a woman. I still wish I was even taller, but I’m aware that my body could have been even worse and I shouldn’t complain, because many other trans guys have bigger problems than I do.
I’m not denying that sexual dimorphism exists among humans. It’s just that human fashion further exaggerates any natural differences. For example, here https://andreasavester.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/differences-between-womens-and-mens-jackets-1600.jpg is an image I recently made for the purpose of illustrating the differences between men’s and women’s jackets. They are cut and sewn differently. It’s not just about size and men having, on average, larger bodies. I have heard people telling me that women’s jackets look masculine. They don’t. In my eyes, most women’s fashion is immensely feminine. It’s designed to emphasize breasts and wide hips, it’s meant to accentuate the feminine body shape. It’s meant to make a woman’s body appear even more feminine. For me, simply putting on male clothes changes the visual appearance of my figure, I no longer look as annoyingly feminine as I look while wearing female clothes. (I prefer a masculine look for myself.)
Shoe sizing is a lot more complicated that just a single number… Here’s what The Shoe Snob has to say: Pet Peeves In The Shoe Industry Part 5 — The Size Guide.
Dunc @#12
My experience with women’s shoes was the the sizing was extremely inconsistent. Sometimes size 40 would fit me. Other times it was 41. On rare occasions it was 39. I never bough women’s shoes online, because the probability of needing to return them was just too high.
I feel like there’s much more consistency with male shoes. Size 40 fits me most of the time. I am comfortable ordering men’s shoes online. I don’t need to return them often. Of course, there are exceptions, for example one of my pairs of male shoes is labelled as size 42.
I suspect that my feet are probably average width, which is why I rarely have problems with the fit of men’s shoes. It’s an entirely different story for my boyfriend, he has narrow feet and he regularly needs to look around in order to find something that fits him.
On of my grandfathers had gout, you definitly have my sympathies.
As for shoes, I just want to have shoes that are comfortable. I despise the whole fashion pressure.
Part of the reason that shoe sizes are not reliable is that every manufacturer has their own lasts, usually patented or treated as trade secrets. So some brands run narrower or shorter than others for the same size and width designations. It’s not as bad as women’s clothing sizing, but still annoying.
I prefer men’s shirts mainly because I like long sleeves that I can roll up, and the plackets on women’s sleeves are too short to do that neatly or comfortably. On men’s shirts there’s an extra inch to inch and a half of space to work with. Also the sleeves are looser. And I know what size I wear, whereas with women’s shirts it’s anyone’s guess without trying it on. The only problem is the narrower hips, but I wear my clothes baggy anyway, so it’s not a big deal.
I am an avid road cyclist and the problem I have been facing is my right foot seems to be wider than my left foot. And the big toes on said right foot bump up against the interior edge of the shoe. Have experienced some serious pain.
I have switched shoes recently and the new shoes solve about 75% of the problem. I can’t go any larger in basic shoe size because the shoes are overall rather loose.
On a related note, my feet generally speaking are bigger than they used to be. Strange.
lochaber@#6:
I haven’t heard of the vodka-socks method before… Is that just a variant on wetting the shoe/boot to stretch it out? (if so, what’s the benefit to using vodka over just water?)
I think the alcohol penetrates the leather faster?
I encountered a commercial “boot stretch spray” which was basically water and alcohol with a bit of glycerine. It worked great – the trick is getting the stuff into the boot without it soaking the bottom where your foot goes.
ridana@#8:
so what happened with your truck and how are the frogs?
The truck has not gone anywhere. I’ve been trying not to push myself too hard. (ha, ha, ha!)
I saw a few more tadpoles than usual last time I was down, and the eggs were gone. I don’t know if they were eaten or washed out of the pond, or what.
Marcus Ranum@17
thanks. I think I have a pair of boots that I mistakenly got in Medium instead of Wide, so I’ll likely give the vodka socks method a try next time I get my current dailies resoled.
Also hoping your most recent flareup calms down soon, I get how trying to push water consumption can get tedious and trying.