Worker's Insider

Feet pain was costing me life after work

They told me sore feet were normal for a man my age. Get used to it. Two years later I could barely make it to my truck. My brother's four years older than me and his feet were worse than mine ever got. Couldn't stand up straight some mornings. Then he came over for a barbecue a few months back and stood out in my backyard the whole afternoon. Never sat down once. So I asked him what he'd done about it. Nine seconds. That's all it took him. And I'd been at this two years. It started with my grandson. He's eight. For about a year there, the second he heard my truck in the driveway he'd come around the side of the house with a football already in his hands. I'd tell him give me a minute, buddy. Let me get my boots off. I'd sit down on the back step to unlace them and that would be that. Ten minutes later I'd still be sitting there. He never got mad about it. That was the worst part. He'd say okay and go throw the ball at the garage door by himself. Then one afternoon I pulled in and he didn't come around the side of the house. He was already out back. Didn't look up. He wasn't mad at me. He'd just learned the answer. I sat in my own driveway for a couple of minutes before I went inside. It wasn't only him. My wife and I used to walk the dogs after dinner. Twenty minutes, down to the corner and back. We did that for years. I started begging off. Told her I'd go in the morning instead. Never did. She stopped asking somewhere in there. Didn't make a thing out of it. I quit the gym. Told myself it was temporary. Put on about thirty pounds I'm still carrying around. Then it got to where I'd say no before anybody even asked. Somebody would bring up a barbecue or a ballgame and I'd already be doing the math on the walk from the parking lot. There was never a day I decided any of this. It went quiet one piece at a time, and by the time I looked up there wasn't much left of my evenings except the couch. I'm fifty-six. Twenty-two years on the same factory floor. Concrete and steel grating, about four miles a day on it, and for twenty of those years I did not think about my feet one single time. Sore feet is part of the job. Everybody's feet hurt. You don't bring that up at work. So I never said a word about it. To anybody. For years. Then the last couple of years it stopped being background noise. Mornings were fine. Mornings were always fine. That's the part that fools you. By nine there'd be a dull ache setting in under my heel. I'd try to walk it off. By lunch it had spread into the ball of my foot too. Every step landing on something. By two it wasn't an ache anymore. Sharp, straight up through the arch. Like stepping on a nail head that isn't there. By three my heels were burning. Like I'd been standing on a stove all day. The last hour I'd count steps to the end of the shift. I'd take the long way around the line if it meant I had a rail to hold. I planned my route across that building to save myself fifty steps. I've put more thought into the layout of that place than into most things in my life. Then the walk out to the truck. A hundred yards. Longest part of my day. I got in the habit of coming in fifteen minutes early just to get the spot closest to the door. Here's one I've never told anybody. There were days I'd go into the bathroom at work, sit down on the lid with my boots still on, and stay there five minutes. I didn't need to. It was the only place in that building where a man can be off his feet and nobody asks him why. Fifty-six years old, hiding in a bathroom stall to sit down. I'd watch the young guys move around that floor like their feet weren't attached to anything. Twenty-four, twenty-five years old, going up the mezzanine stairs two at a time. And I'd sit there thinking about how long it was going to be before I turned into the guy everybody works around. The one they give the easy end of the line to and don't say anything about it. Nobody had said it to me yet. But I'd started listening for it. The end of the shift was never the end of it either. I got to where I'd take my boots off in the truck before I drove home. Sit out in that lot in my socks for a minute first. Then I'd get to the house and hobble from the driveway to the door like an old man. Rolling to the outside edge of my feet trying to keep the weight off my heels. Straight to the couch. Boots off, feet up on the arm of it, don't talk to me for an hour. That was the arrangement in my house for two years. Everybody knew it. Nobody said it out loud. Our stairs turned into a whole production. I'd go up one at a time, both feet on each step, hand on the rail. At the grocery store I leaned on the cart. That's what the cart was for by then. And my Saturdays were gone. The whole day. I'd wake up hurting worse than I did Friday and spend the day getting ready to maybe be able to do something Sunday. Then Sunday I'd rest up for Monday. Two days off a week and I spent both of them recovering from the other five. The mornings were the worst of it though. First few steps out of bed I'd have a hand on the bathroom sink. Testing the floor the way you'd test ice on a pond. Waiting to find out what kind of day it was going to be. Some mornings it was like the bottoms of my feet were glass and somebody had already cracked them. I'd sit on the edge of the bed with my boots in my hand and just look at them. I'm not going to dress that up. There were mornings I sat there and did not want to put them on. My feet swelled up so bad by the afternoon that I went a whole size up in boots so they wouldn't be tight. That's where I was at. Buying boots that didn't fit me in the morning so they'd fit me at three o'clock. Then my right knee started. Then my lower back, every single day, right about three. And that scared me worse than my feet ever did. Feet you can push through. A knee is something else. I'd get up at two in the morning to use the bathroom and have to put a hand on the wall to get there. I had a pretty good idea where the whole thing was headed. I just didn't want to look straight at it. I tried what everybody tries. Gel inserts from the drugstore. Forty bucks. Felt great walking around the kitchen in my socks. First full shift and they were already going flat. Two weeks and they were paper. Custom orthotics after that. Six hundred and fifty dollars. Casts of my feet, three week wait, the whole production. Somehow they made it worse. So rigid I couldn't finish a shift standing in them, and I came home with blisters on top of everything else. Three pairs of boots in two years. Two-sixty. Three-ten. Then three-forty on a pair a guy on my line swore by. Every time, same story. First week I'd think I'd finally fixed it. By week three I was right back where I started. Ibuprofen. Two before the shift, two at lunch, two more in the truck on the way home most days. That went on a lot longer than I want to admit. Ice pack every night in front of the TV. I ran the numbers one time. About nineteen hundred dollars in two years to feel exactly the same as when I started. I did go see a doctor about it. He looked at my feet for maybe ninety seconds. Said plantar fasciitis. Printed me off a page of stretches. Then he told me the rest of it was pretty normal for a man my age doing the work I do. Said I'd probably want to get used to it. A man my age. Get used to it. I drove home with both of those. And here's the thing. I already believed it. He just made it official. I'd gone soft. That was my read on myself. Twenty-two years and I'd finally worn out. I never said that out loud. Not to my wife. Not to one guy on that floor. You don't. I'd lie there at night doing the math instead. Nine years to sixty-five. Whether I had nine more of these in me. But it wasn't the nine years that kept me up. It was the other side of them. My grandfather taught me to fish. He was in his seventies and he'd stand in a river four hours straight. I can still tell you exactly what his hands looked like on that rod. What my grandson was going to remember is a guy on a back step telling him to give me a minute. That's the one I couldn't get past. I wasn't losing my job. I was losing whatever comes after the job. And I was losing it right then, at fifty-six, while it was still sitting there in front of me. Which brings me back to my brother. Nathan ran a loading dock for eighteen years. Feet in worse shape than mine ever got. So out in the backyard that afternoon I asked him what he'd done about it. Figured he'd say surgery, or shots, or some specialist two hours away. He asked me where my boots were. I went and got them. He pulled the insert out of the right one, pressed his thumb down into the heel, and held it up so I could see it. It stayed down. Never came back up. "There it is," he said. "It's not your age. It's that." Nine seconds. Like I said. That insert had about a year on it. Crushed flat right where my heel goes. And in two years I had never once looked at it. Then he said something I've thought about pretty much every day since. "Everybody buys new boots. Nobody ever looks at what's inside them." He sent me something to read before he left. I got to it that night after everyone went home, and it was the first time in three years that anything about my feet made any sense at all. Under your heel there's a pad of fat. That's what keeps your heel bone off the floor. You get one of those for your whole life. The insole in your boot is supposed to protect it. But standard insoles are cheap plastic, and under a real shift load they compress and stop springing back. The foot doctor who wrote it called that Collapse Fatigue. Once the insole is dead, your heel bone is taking the floor direct. Four miles a day of it. That grinds the fat pad down. Fat pad atrophy. That's the burning under the heel that turns up by lunch and won't quit. Then I got to the line that made me stand up in my own kitchen at eleven o'clock at night. It doesn't grow back. After that the arch takes over a job it was never built to do. That's the plantar fasciitis. Then the knee carries what the foot won't. Then the back carries what the knee won't. Every single thing on my list. In order. In the exact order it happened to me. Three years of it, explained in about four minutes. I sat there thinking about the six hundred and fifty dollar orthotics. The three pairs of boots. The doctor and his printout. Not one of them ever pulled the insert out of my boot and looked at it. What Nathan was running is called WorkFit, from a company called SoleBrace. Built for this specifically. Four separate zones instead of one flat pad that's going to pack out on you. Rebound pods sitting under the heel and the forefoot, which are the two spots where that fat pad takes the beating. They spring back between steps instead of crushing down and staying down. Memory foam core underneath that. Real orthopedic arch support actually holding the arch up instead of just sitting there. Honeycomb base spreading the load so it isn't all landing in one place. They come as two pairs. You run one pair while the other recovers, then swap them. That's the whole point of it. Foam that gets a rest between shifts holds up. I ordered them that night and didn't tell my wife. I'd been wrong too many times. Thirty day guarantee on them was the only reason I was willing to be wrong one more. First few days, nothing. I figured here we go. One more thing that isn't going to work. Day four I got in the door and made it to about nine o'clock before I realized I hadn't gone and gotten the ice pack. Day six the arch pain that always showed up by lunch didn't show up. I kept waiting on it all afternoon. End of the second week I came in off a full shift and stood at the kitchen counter going through the mail. Stood there maybe five minutes. I had not stood anywhere on purpose in two years. That's the one that got me. Mornings changed before anything else did. I quit reaching for the sink. Three months in, that knee settled down on its own. I hadn't done one single thing for that knee. The back followed about a month behind it. Same floor. Same shifts. Same four miles. I started walking the dogs again. My wife came along the first night and didn't say a word about it, which I appreciated. Back at the gym twice a week. Not setting any records. Going. I got my Saturdays back, and I didn't even know that was on the table. Then a few weeks ago I pulled into the driveway and my grandson came around the side of the house with that football. First time in a long while. I don't know what made him try me again. I didn't ask for a minute. I got out of the truck and told him to go long. We were out there until we couldn't see the ball anymore. My wife watched the whole thing from the kitchen window. When I came in she said, "you're different." Last weekend we took both grandkids camping. Two nights in a tent. A year ago I'd have found a reason not to go. I hadn't gone soft. I hadn't worn out. I wasn't too old for it. I was standing on something that had quit on me, and I spent three years blaming myself instead. That's the part I'd have wanted somebody to tell me. I'm not going to sit here and say my feet don't get tired. Twelve hours on concrete, they get tired. Tired is fine. Tired is the job. What's gone is the sharp part. The hobbling through my own house. Counting steps. The ice pack. Sitting out in that lot in my socks working up to driving home. If you're anywhere near my age, do this before you do anything else. Go out to your truck. Pull the insert out of your work boot and press your thumb into the heel of it. If it stays down, there's your answer. And it isn't your age. I've got nine years left on that floor and I'm going to do every one of them. But I want the guy who comes home at the end of them too. And I want my grandkids to remember him standing up. I never did get used to it. Turned out I didn't have to. If you've spent years telling yourself sore feet are just part of it, the concrete, the hours, the boots, your weight, your age, it was never the concrete. It was never your age. It was what was happening under your heel one shift at a time, in the one part of your boot nobody ever looks at. I'm sharing this because if you're getting home with nothing left in you, and the people in your house have quit asking... Maybe it doesn't have to stay that way. I was fifty-six and getting ready to hand over everything that comes after the work. Click "Learn more" and see what they're about. I'm just a guy who thought he was done and found out he wasn't. Figured I'd put it out there.