Tales from Suburban Bohemia: Heel Spur
This post originally appeared on Stumpy Moose on 27 January, 2002, and was migrated to PraguePig.com on 6 January, 2019.
I’m growing a hook on the bottom of my foot.
It’s a calcium deposit called a heel spur.
On the x-ray it looked like a talon or the beginnings of a cloven hoof but it doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about.
I’d been limping around the city since I twisted my ankle warming-up to play five-a-side soccer last year. Having gone on to play quite well, I’d almost hoped that it was something quite serious, like a fracture, so I could casually boast about my Bert Trautmann-style heroics.
But after looking up my symptoms on that hypochondriac’s heaven, WebMD, I decided that it was just a trapped nerve.
Now that I’ve got Czech medical insurance, though, I thought I’d get it looked at.
Our landlord’s a doctor so he set me up with a specialist, Dr. Seifert, at the teaching hospital where he works.
The faculty is primarily an ear, nose, and throat clinic, so you feel like a bit of an interloper swanning about, looking perfectly healthy, while wheezing old men are wheeled around the place.
Although Dr. Seifert spoke very little English and I speak very little Czech, the diagnosis went pretty smoothly.
Dr. Seifert prescribed ten ultrasound sessions to blast the heel spur out of my foot and sent me to a clinic at the Charles University’s sports faculty, up the road.
This was pretty exciting. Ultrasound sounds cool, and even cooler in Czech (“ultrazvuk”). The thought of being treated at a sports clinic seemed vaguely heroic too.
Czech hospitals are a bit bewildering, and not very strong on what you’d call customer service so getting by without too many language skills is a problem.
After a few hours of being ignored I discovered that my insurance isn’t valid at the sports faculty, so I’ve got to hobble off to another doctor in the Prague 6 district next week and try to book an appointment.
Unlike me, this story could run and run.
–Sam Beckwith
