Grumpy old man

My feet are playing up again. Same problem as last year (my feet hurt) only this time worse. Sorry to get graphic and intimate dear reader but your world would be meaningless without reading about my feet. Yesterday, like a fool, I took junior with me to a doctor here in hot humid Moscow. The clinic has a translator. She is a fairly attractive women but has a face that looks like its sucking on a lemon if you get the picture? She speaks fairly good English but does not know all the medical terminology or medical problems that are common to many in the English language. Try telling a Russian doctor you have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) if you can I'll pay you! I have tried twice and failed both times even after printing off wiki and putting it all into the Russian language. At times, I feel like a grumpy old man and probably am fast becoming one living here, especially in this relentless heat.

I have eczema and very hard foot skin. Luckily for me, linguistically eczema is said in almost the same way as in Russian.  My feet resemble that of a tramps who has been walking around the city without any shoes on. Not a pretty site. The other day, after a bad itching session, my wife thought it would be helpful to put that pink stinging disinfectant onto my open foot wounds. Perhaps it was out of spite or she needed some cruel amusement but lets just say my screams could probably be heard in London after she had applied the lotion. This is why I went to the doctors.

We went to see a dermatologist that could have been a taxidermist by the way he behaved. I went in with junior as I could not leave him alone at home although I was tempted.  The doctor seemed more interested in filling in my personal details and in putting the consultation price on the bill, than at looking at my sore feet. Maybe he wanted us out of his examination room as quickly as possible as junior began to take everything of his desk and stuck the doctors pen up his nose while the sour faced translator, translated god only knows what to the doctor. The doctor looked at my feet without touching them and asked me if I was stressed, I replied 'of course I'm stressed, I'm married!'. The translator cracked a small smile and the doctor suggested I drink a vodka at night before going to bed, which would be fine but I hate Vodka. He prescribed me more pink stuff to put on my feet and some allergy pills. I went home and applied the pink stuff and took an allergy pill that knocked me out cold for a good nine hours sleep. I woke up the next morning with pink feet and a banging headache although ironically not due to drinking any vodka.  This strange thing is that I went there to get eczema cream but left the doctors without any cream. Typical.

It's so hot here in Moscow that I have been wearing sandals to let the air caress my foot wounds. I have been hobbling around the gardens at my part time job, looking after child X. The nannies in the community look at me as if I had just escaped from a Soviet mental institution as I push child X around in his pram with my bare ugly pink feet. You could not make this shit up and I don't trust me.

After I left work today, I went to a local park on my own to get some alone time to unwind (see note). My own nanny was at home looking after junior. I went to a park, found a tree with long droopy branches to hide under, took my shoes off and lay down to get some shade from the sun and took a nap. To imagine you are in nature within this mega city, a park is the closet one can get to revive the spirit and wash the city soot away. I gazed up through the leaves coloured as the sun danced through the branches making the leaves different shades of yellow that shone like yellow leaves of fire. My feet were on fire due to the shoes that I had wear to drive to the park as they rubbed on my feet wounds, trainers (sneakers) cook your feet especially in the summer. After a while, I fell into a fitful sleep under the branches of the droopy tree. When I woke up, I had ants in my ears and ants in my pants. I sat up, not knowing where I was, who I was and I felt confused and dazed, which is not so unusual for me. I reached for my trainers and they were gone. Perhaps stolen by some tramp, who thought I was a tramp. Just my luck.

I drove back home with bare feet, back through the thick Moscow traffic to my flat. Driving without shoes on like a bare foot hippie, is not so easy. Luckily, my trainers were cheap ones, so no loss there. The heavens opened and it poured down with rain. The consolation prize today is that the city is now slightly cooler although my feet still burn. I expect I'll have to go back to the doctors again and demand antibiotics or Vodka or both.

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