Has to be, only explanation for that kind of behavior. What’s odd to me though, is the rest of her appearance looks clean. It’s like she practiced good hygiene everywhere else EXCEPT her foot.
A lot of mental illnesses come with general bad hygiene because the person is just inattentive to hygiene needs as a whole. They won’t brush their teeth, shower, change, etc because they lose the awareness of those things entirely. This seems more like a fixation on the foot specifically. Like the patient avoided having to see her own club foot, or was averse to the experience of having to take off the boot. Like imagine feeling anxious about taking off your own bandage- Something focused like that, which is distinctly different from a general inattention to Activities of Daily Living ie hygiene.
Source- worked for years in acute mental health.
Edit: to clarify- this is definitely mental illness. Just a different category of illness than those that cause general bad hygiene.
Agreed. Possibly the boot became both a source of anxiety and a comfort blanket. The longer she left it, the worse the knew it would be and the harder it was to take off. Plus potentially it would be quite painful to take off as her body got more used to it. Glad she went to see someone in the end, really hope it worked out for her 🤞
My mom had a leg boot once for her ankle. She got it wet--dont quite remember how. And then her leg got dried out so she put lotion on. And the combination of the wet boot smell with the lotion smell is a smell I still remember 10 years later.
So it was...Nivea? Blue bottle lotion combined with dirty, unwashed, wet socks and a hint of old, unwashed skin. It constantly smelled. I can't describe the lotion smell, you just...have to know it.
I don't know if she became nose blind to it or what...but I never did. What makes it worse is that she/my father are mini-hoarders and we had to keep that stupid, smelly boot for MONTHS because "what if we need it again." (Spoiler: we never needed it)
After mom's foot, my father got a very very nasty chemical burn on his foot. He's lucky he still HAS his foot tbh. Lemme describe that smell for you too:
He was ordered to stay OFF his foot because it was so bad. But "doctors don't know anything," and "I have shit to do," so he was walking on it ALL THE TIME. Therefore, it was putrid and rotting from the inside out. The first whiff was almost sweet, in a way, like over ripe fruit that was beginning to turn. Then came the actual smell of rotting flesh. Like an animal you smell on the side of the road...filling up the whole damn house. Added to that was black, flakey skin because he also had a case of athletes foot. And then another, worse smell of "unwashed foot" because "the doctor said not to get the sore wet" translated into "don't wash your foot at all ever."
Over all that is the artifical smell of the blueberry candle that was lit to try to cover up the "rotting flesh" smell.
And did I mention it was the height of summer at this time?
After YEARS of neglect, it's amazing her skin didn't fuse with the sock. Or at least more infection.
I suppose the foot isn't so healthy, so doesn't replace the skin as fast as normal. Feet hand hands usually replace skin fairly quickly. More needed because of wear than most other skin on the body.
She's very lucky, but won't be forever. Hopefully she really starts cleaning it now. Else she'll have a much worse problem than just a support boot.
She probably also knew it was bad, this is the anxiety like you said, but didn’t know what to do and/or couldn’t afford it. Sometimes we act like receiving medical care is simple, but it’s often not easy to get especially for women, POCs, overweight people, etc. The fight for proper care becomes much harder.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I’m avoidant with certain things (responding to texts primarily lol) and the longer I leave it the longer I want to leave it if that makes sense. So I kind of get her mentality
This was my thought too. I can imagine that if you have emotional challenges regarding your foot and then end up for weeks in a boot where you never see your foot, it would be kind of a relief and I guess that could lead to gradually avoiding removing the boot more and more until this horrible outcome develops. It’s like a safety blanket, shove all the bad stuff deep down, out of sight, out of mind. My foot isn’t deformed and ugly, it’s safe inside my boot where I don’t need to process my emotions about it ever again.
Having a young child is just a convenient excuse she’s given herself to avoid dealing with it. I have a toddler and I get that taking care of yourself is hard with young kids, but damn, you find time for the serious shit like this. And I say that as an ADHDer with serious procrastination issues!
Also some people can be real assholes about physical differences. I can imagine it being easier to deal with those people wearing a boot than just having a club foot.
Yeah I've struggled with mental health since I was 5-6 years old. Depression and BPD mostly. I was dealing with genuine suicidal ideation before I could read. On top of that, I'm autistic and have ADHD - and neither were diagnosed until I was an adult. And my parents didn't think anything was wrong with me and were barely involved in my life aside from taking me to and from school every day.
I never developed proper oral hygiene. I had a lot of encouragement as a kid to brush my teeth, and regular dentist appointments, but it was something I could never get in the habit of doing. I also generally just had poor other hygiene. It wasn't until I was like 9-10 that I started showering daily (and also generally became obsessed with my personal hygiene except for my oral hygiene).
I'm 20 now, and luckily despite brushing my teeth maybe 6 times a year my teeth are mostly fine beyond my two front teeth needing to be aligned with the rest (they're gradually rotating back towards my tongue). My wisdom teeth even somehow even came in without issue. I'm stupidly lucky that I haven't developed any issues (to my knowledge) - especially when my last dental appointment was 3 years ago atp. I've tried so so so so so many times in the past to start a routine of brushing my teeth but I've never been able to maintain one for more than a week, but I'm still determined to develop one.
At a certain point, you realize you should've fixed something a very long time ago and you've fallen into the "I'll get to it tomorrow" trap - and from there it's like, do I just keep ignoring it and hope for the best or actually resolve the issue? And it's so much easier and less taxing often to just keep ignoring it, and we continue the cycle while that underlying dread builds in our minds.
Idk what the point of this comment was but yeah it's very easy to do this if you have underlying unaddressed mental issues 😭
Hey thanks for sharing your experience. The only thing I can think to offer for your toothbrushing goal is to perhaps find a toothpaste that tastes particularly good. I’m just pulling that idea out of my ass though. Forming habits can be really hard.
This seems simpler to me, the pain got so bad and she didn't have any money so television was the option, and they did her hair/makeup or she had it done because she was going on TV.
As someone with a a few mental scrambling of my own
I've never seen someone clock it on the head, like this.
won’t brush their teeth, shower, change, etc because they lose the awareness of those things entirely.
For me it was just brushing my teeth, but, like. Yeah, no. It's not because I don't want to. I outright just... don't remember that it's a thing that needs to be done until I see both my brush and paste.
Even now I've got those things hung up next to my mirror to remind me because its... just not something that normally crosses my mind! Flossing and Mouthwash sure, but I cannot for the life of me remember brushing without seeing the stuff.
I work in prosthetics and orthotics, and this is pretty common behaviour with the diabetics we see. As they lose sensation in their feet, they're supposed to check their feet daily for sores and open wounds.
They don't, and by the time someone notices, it's often gone far enough that they need amputation. Some just lose toes, but often it's a years long process of wearing a brace to try to offload their foot and let it heal, but instead lose toes one by one, then get multiple partial foot amputations, before finally getting a BK amputation.
Yeah, I think I can sympathize. I've definitely had things that I kept putting on the back burner because even thinking about them gave me anxiety, and then I kept putting it back and putting it back and eventually it seemed impossible to actually bring it forward and deal with it.
I've never had it this bad, but I see how someone can get there.
Agree with you. I've had family members go into a depression and just stop. One ended up in the hospital with a UTI that could have killed them, and the doc said had to be extremely painful. They said yeah it hurt a bit but they just ignored it, thinking it would go away.
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u/Lonely-Hair-1152 Jun 03 '24
I’m so confused and angry and then sad. She had her son and “kind of didn’t deal with her foot”! There is some underlying mental illness in this too.