Metatarsalgia foot pain

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This blog deals with metatarsalgia. Metatarsalgia is a foot pain condition. This deals with the metatarsalgia foot pain that my friend Al had and it deals with our exchanges dealing with it. My friend Al was the owner of a small machine shop that basically had two people; himself and his brother-in-law Keith. Al’s dad was fairly well to do, having made some wise real estate investments in his early years and had amassed quite some wealth. Al had worked in the auto body repair business for quite some time and then wanted to start his own business. He then talked with his dad about it; the dad told him that he would finance the loans required to get his machine shop equipped and facilitated and then Al could then run it.

By the time I had met Al, he was in his late fifties, almost approaching sixty years in age. That late in life, he still worked very hard as far as I could tell, constantly machining parts every day. That is quite a bit of work considering the fact that it was a job shop business, meaning that one day they could be making a thousand widgets and the next day they could be asked to make a two piece prototype piece for experimental purposes and the third day they could be making parts made of plastic and the fourth day they could be making something out of stainless steel and so on. So it involved a lot of machine set ups and tool set ups and programming and so on.

Al and I became real close friends. One day after work, we went to a local bar and decided to have a couple of drinks. I remember the day very clearly. On that summer evening, Al told me that he was having significant pains in his feet. I asked him what kind of pains were they and where were they really felt the most. He told me that he felt his pains the most under his big toe; “in the balls of my feet”, he told me. I said “Al, you probably have metatarsalgia.”

“What is metatarsalgia?”, he asked me with a grin on his face.

“Al, you probably think I have no idea of what I am talking about; but let me tell you, if you severe pain in the balls of your feet, you probably cannot rule out metatarsalgia.”

“Did you bang your feet against something or did something drop on your feet?”

“No.”

“Did you hit a rock or some other hard object with the balls of your feet?”

“No.”

“Then you cannot rule out metatarsalgia. Get an appointment with your podiatrist and take care of this rightaway.”

“But I don’t know of a podiatrist.”

“Then find one real quick.”

We paid the bartender and we called it a day.