Writing is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration

At this point I start to wonder if the Army hasn’t really outsmarted us all; if all the training at alien-like landscapes for city-slickers like myself really has effectively desensitized my mind and morale to the culture shock of deployment. Maybe the sleeping in aluminum-framed mushy bunks, showering in cold water behind fluttering curtains, and eating food that doesn’t taste quite right is all part of the Army job in America for a reason, and not for lack of funding and planning. But to deploy most of the world away and have the exact conditions as the usual field problem?

There is a bar where Marines en-route home after finishing their tour can drink two beers ever 20 hours and sing karaoke. There is a BX (base exchange) with a scaled selection of even the best shoppette back home.

Or maybe it’s the fact that even in Kyrgyzstan I manage to have a wifi connection at my bunk and Dr. Pepper and the Stanley Cup playoffs in the chow hall.

Either way, at this point, everything is ‘no big deal.’ The commercial planes had pretty decent food and good movies. We are now just stuck in the cliché Army hurry-up-and-wait status. A flash of light at 0200 local time and they started collecting information for our flight that was scheduled for 0600. An hour later the flight was canceled, for some unknown reason.

Kyrgyzstan outside Manas Air Force Base, in the shade of snow-capped Himalayas, may be in the middle of a bloody coup, but life at deployment-in-transition is melancholy. There are no briefings to attend. There are no drills to rehearse. There is a copious amount of American food, and the only thing we’re killing is time.

The hardest part right now is switching my sleep schedule by 13 hours. It’s dark outside, so my brain is convinced it’s time for sleep. But my internal clock is skeptical, knowing my circadian rhythms are punching in for the day back home at 9 a.m. Most of the guys are dealing with this by simply sleeping the entire day and night.

I’m also trying this caffeine detox thing. I’ve had a single cup of coffee since we left, compared to the usual 4-6 cups a day. The headaches didn’t start until today, and I think that will be the worst of it. Once my body clock, like my Windows laptop, gets set to the Astana time zone I’ll get back to a modest regiment. But for now I’m reaping the benefits of a fully stocked PSP kit, a 110v outlet for my laptop, months of ripping movies to a 500gb hard drive and multiple books.

Inshallah, we’ll leave soon.

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Tuesday I’ll finally be getting “un-screwed” by the Army, almost exactly one year after getting “screwed” by the Army (and yes, I just linked to my own blog, so I’m pretty sure that elevates my blog status out of the noob phase).

In July after my initial recovery I started having pain in my foot. It wasn’t too bad at first, and I chalked it up to standard recovery pains. I thought I was coming back to running and exercise at a decent pace but who knows. I was able to run through the pain for about a month before deciding the pain was more than normal recovery pain.

I went to our unit physician and he said it was probably plantar fasciitis. Even though I didn’t fit the usual bill for a PF patient (over 40, over weight, extreme runner) it was probably a complication of my recovery. After taking his advice and not running for a month, the pain still hadn’t significantly subsided.

It took a full month to get an appointment with a podiatrist. The diagnosis was plantar fasciitis, but that wasn’t all. She said I had another broken bone in my foot, and that the screw put in last year was backing itself out. The other broken bone is a small circular bone under the first joint of my big toe. She seemed to think this bone broke in the last few months, but I think it broke around the same time as my original break and went undiagnosed (the bone is barely visible on an x-ray, and my first doctor was only a general orthopedic, not a podiatrist).

Ironically that broken bone didn’t cause me any pain. But that bone is what the plantar fascia tendon attaches to and dissipates 130 percent of your body weight while walking. So like a stretched rubber band that starts to tear at its stress points, my plantar fascia was being pulled wrong because of that small broken bone.

Further irony arose in my treatment options. The plantar fascia is treated with anti inflammatory medication, stretching, physical therapy and wearing a night splint. The screw needed to be surgically removed. The stretching and physical therapy couldn’t take place during and after surgical recovery. So, both had to be treated independently. At the time the plantar fasciitis pain in my heel was ten times the hardware pain, and the screw doesn’t necessarily have to be removed. I opted to try the heel treatments first and see if that would take care of the problem.

Oh, she also said one of my legs was shorter than the other and that, combined with my scoliosis, was probably affecting the way I walk and the heel pain. Therefore the total prognosis became anti-inflammatory drugs, physical therapy, wearing a night splint, an MRI to measure the length of my legs, custom boot inserts, and chiropractor treatments.

FML. I’m a walking shit show.

After a month of that craziness the pain in my heel went down significantly. That, however, revealed how much more the screw problem was affecting me. So at my follow up I talked to my podiatrist about surgery.

That was the first week of December. Surgery was finally scheduled last week for February 23rd.

Three cheers for government health care!

Anyway, this surgery is expected to be much less invasive than getting the screw put in. I’ll only be on crutches for a week or so, and then some time in a walking boot. All in all I should walk normally in one month. Time before running again is TBD.

I’ll be ready to go for Afghanistan, but I definitely won’t be as physically ready as I thought I would be when I first envisioned deploying. Other than that I’m hoping for the best and I’ll be enjoying my 30 days of convalescent leave to the fullest — I think I’ve deserved it.

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