Athletic socks
White socks are boring, but if you wear sneakers 90% of the time, it’s a good bet you’ll be wearing a lot of white socks. I wear sneakers at least 90% of the time, so most of my socks are white. And, over the past 3-4 years, my ‘collection’ migrated from calf length to ankle length. This was all well and fine until my left ankle decided it had taken enough abuse over the years and it started hurting me pretty much all the time.
My primary care doctor was baffled by my ankle, since I could support weight on it, hop on it, do whatever I wanted, it just hurt. So he sent me to get an Xray and to see a specialist, who told me that the tendons were inflamed, and that I should wear a brace for 6 weeks. I did this, and my ankle was feeling much better, but he said that really, I should get an MRI to see what’s really going on. The MRI showed a ‘loose body’ near the joint, as well as some damage to the ligament, and these were the primary problems – the inflamed tendons were a side effect of this other damage – and these problems are most likely a side effect of me breaking that ankle when I was 14.
The upshot to all of this is that since the end of January I’ve been wearing the ankle brace pretty much all of the time. The brace is fairly comfortable, that’s not a big deal, but you really need to wear a calf length sock with it. Luckily I still had a few of those left over from the old days (as well as my fancier and heavier hiking socks), so I could get by, but socks became my laundry limiter, instead of underwear, and since I don’t have laundry facilities in my building, doing laundry is sort of a pain in the ass. While the brace was going to be a short term solution, I figured I would just deal with it…
However now that I know what the real problem is, and that it requires surgery to fix (thankfully pretty routine surgery), and that I don’t want to be hobbling around in the summer, I am going to need to wear the brace for quite a while longer. I’m planning on surgery in November (so as to be after my birthday – I guess I can see if I can do very late october too), which is 6 more months of brace wearing prior to surgery, and then there will be months of wearing afterwards.
All of this is a long way of saying that I bought 20 pairs of calf length crew socks at target the other day, and my ankle length socks are going to be taken out of the drawer and put into a box under my bed for the time being. Also, congratulations if you read this far!