Toe Woes

I wonder what's wrong with my feet. I spent one day last month doing a lot of walking on hard floors in hard-soled shoes that pinch, and that night they ached so badly I could hardly put weight on them. They felt physically broken. That was a while ago and they've gotten better, then worse, then better again. It's mostly my right foot. Sometimes it really hurts across the ball of my foot to have it pressing against anything (like the sole of my shoe), even when I'm just sitting down, so I have to take my shoe off. I was in my socks, incidentally, when I met Bill Nye. I thought for a while I might have broken a bone. But surely someone with a broken foot would not be getting out her seat to jump around. Could bruised metatarsals really take three weeks to heal?

I do know that I excessively pronate, particularly my right foot, and I have the beginnings of a bunion. Which I thought was something only old people got. Maybe I could be in Guinness as the Youngest Bunion Ever.

Anyway, so far I have spent $40 on two pairs of insoles and on a bunion regulator that may be a scam, that I'm supposed to wear at night like a retainer (no, on my foot, silly). It's frustrating not to know what's wrong, and not to see any steady improvement. Sometimes I am glad that my body just goes about its business quietly healing without any direction on my part - I forget to check a cut or scrape for a few days, then look at it and wow! it's all healed up. Other times I wish I had a bit more control over the process - I'd like to just switch to WYSIWYG and see what's wrong and fix it myself.