Turns out I have been in intolerable pain with my bunion for weeks. After waking up in pain and sobbing before I’d even managed to make breakfast in the kitchen, I made an appointment with the GP.

She was entirely sympathetic, saying she’d had one too and knew just how debilitating they could be. She had to help me get my shoes off to examine me and I whimpered the entire time.

“You need the steroid injection.” she smiled, promising to mark the referral as urgent. She wrote me a prescription for co-codamol when I told her it was the only painkiller that had done anything for the pain and some high strength pain gel. Honestly, I wasn’t optimistic, but followed the instructions when I got home – and managed to put my foot on the floor without a shooting pain through my toe.

Didn’t cry when I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

Where was the pain?

I realised, slowly throughout the day that I have been in pain with my feet for years. A low level ache, always there, like a hum in the background. It not being there at all was almost more obvious, my brain trying to feel the void by imagining the pain that had always been there, being so confused that it wasn’t there.

I have never been so thrilled to be awre of that hum of pain, because that was all there was. No shooting pains, no sobbing, no feeling uncapable.

I got home from the school run, thrilled that I had managed it. There was a parcel on the table, the bunion splint I ordered. I had splints to keep my feet straight when I was a kid and I hated them. This felt like Christmas. I put it straight on and felt the pull of my big toe into a straight position and immediate relief. I was so bewildered by the lack of pain, when I took the splint off, I wiggled my big toe manually and waited for the shooting pains. None. The toe moved, with no pain. I haven’t known this since about age 5.

So maybe, just maybe, with the prospect of pain relief in the form of the steroid injection on the horizion and a toe that might actually have painless movement in it, I don’t have to fear for my mobility just yet. Maybe I can stay on my own two feet a bit longer.

Maybe not miles at a time. But today, crossing the road from the school gate, Gabby & I got on a bus to playgroup. She was confused because 1) we haven’t been to playgroups since they all stopped for Christmas in mid December and 2) we’ve always brought her trike and walked everywhere.

But it’s only been one day without pain after weeks of it being unbearable. So I need to look after myself. And we made it there. She got to play, I got to be out of the house and feel like I was a mum, doing the mum things, not disability first.

Gabby sat on my lap at the bus stop, giggling when she realised how cold my nose was against hers and I was so ridiculously happy. I had done the right thing, going to the doctor, not trying to get back to walking miles immediately. So what if I get buses everywhere? I might even start driving more. It gets me doing whatever I want to be doing. I don’t need to be in judgement of myself, because God knows I’m dealing with enough. I am so ridiculously grateful to just be my old self, with my old aches and pains.