No more Plantar Fasciitis

About this time last year I went to the doctor in CA because I had this horrible pain in my left heel.  He told me I had Plantar Fasciitis and would need to rest my foot, do a lot of stretching and ice it.  At the time, Andrew and I were making plans to move overseas, making it difficult to stay off my feet!  I did roll my foot over a frozen water bottle while I was at work and stretched throughout the day for months and tried to stay off it as much as possible. About five months later, not feeling any relief, the doctor gave me a brace for my foot so that even if I had to walk it would be resting the tendons in my foot. He told me I should wear it for 4-6 weeks. After 4 weeks I was still in a lot of pain, so I kept wearing the brace for another couple of weeks.

The problem was, wearing the brace caused me to walk funny.....sooooo, I ended up with not only the pain in my foot, but knee pain on my left leg and right hip pain!  I also noticed that my ankle got very very weak because of the walking cast. Oh myyyyy!  So, I took the brace off, tried to stay off my foot, stretched and iced and still no relief. So, I took it upon myself to start doing yoga again once I got settled in in Haarlem. I had had to stop doing yoga when I was involved in an accident...but thought it would probably be okay to start up again. I had been having a lot of neck pain from the accident and figured it would help with that too.

So,  I found a couple of app's on my IPAD, and started following a DVD I had brought from home. The IPAD APP's are Yoga and Pilates with Kristin McGee. I bought the Yoga for Your Back, Yoga for Energy and Pilates for Butt and Thighs. I also was following (most of!) the DVD called "The Bar Method-Change Your Body" with Founder Burr Leonard. I bought the DVD through Amazon.com. The first couple of weeks were pretty tough-I was very out of shape. After a few weeks though I started noticing some changes....the pain in my foot was lessening, my neck felt better and my back felt great! Overall, a great improvement. However, apparently the moves from the yoga were messing with the problems with my brain injury and making me more dizzy again, so now I am only able to do parts of the workouts. Anything that means bending over or moving my head side to side I have had to eliminate....that is a lot more of the workouts than I realized. My neighbor suggested Tai Chi-since it's all done upright....So, I'm going to look for exercise programs on-line to learn how to do that.

Regarding the Plantar Fasciitis...I had read somewhere that lying down, raising your legs and writing the alphabet with your feet was a good way to stretch your feet and strengthen your legs and knees. So, I did that too-it really seemed to help.

After eleven months, the Plantar Fasciitis is gone! The pain in my knee and hip are also gone! Yippppeeee! After seeing a therapist about the dizziness I still suffer from the accident, she told me that a lot of the yoga moves are out for me...forever.......That makes me very very sad. Yoga is the only exercise I've done over the years that strengthens my entire body. I'm going to continue to do some yoga with some modifications, but will have to eliminate a lot of the movements.

I've taken to wearing inserts in all of my shoes now-making sure there is arch support....and I never go barefoot anymore! I bought some great inserts at Hansen's Shoes in Valley Fair Mall in San Jose, CA and the ones I got at The Walking Company Store at Stoneridge Mall in Pleasanton, CA are good also.