About a month ago, I wrote about how I sprained my left foot during rehearsal for Scrooge. At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was my foot or my ankle. Then I was sitting in Dad’s room in the hospital last week just kinda shifting my feet around on the floor and I felt a pretty sharp pain on both sides right at the arch. Yep, there’s definitely something wrong with my foot.
It’s been a few weeks since we finished Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations, so I’ve only had rehearsals on Saturdays for… God knows how many hours. (Today, we ran both acts twice and had a lunch break that lasted close to an hour. We started at 9:00 and finished about 4:45. That’s a lot of singing and dancing and I’m pooped.) But still, you’d think that having so much time off during each week would give my foot plenty of time to heal. That’s what I was thinking, but nope! Still hurts!
My foot is the problem area, but when I went looking at braces and wraps at sporting goods stores, all they had were for ankles. Some of them reached halfway up the shin down to near the ball of the foot, but they didn’t look like they provided much support for the arch. Thus, I headed to a store I could trust: Fleet Farm. Then I headed to the area of the store that had what I was looking for: the equine section.
In the midst of all the horse brushes and kettlebells for horses to hold in their mouths to exercise their necks (no, I’m not kidding), Fleet Farm sells a product called Vetrap. It’s good stuff. It’s basically a self-adhesive Ace bandage. Wrap it snug around something (like, say, the arch of your foot), squish it together and it’ll stay in place. Since all of it adheres to itself, it doesn’t move around, which is good for support and bad when you’re trying to take it off afterward. (You either have to find the end and peel it all off or just cut it with a scissors, which is way easier.)
I had some at home, so I used that today along with my ankle brace for safety and it worked pretty well. That didn’t save my feet as a whole since today was the first time I wore my new dance shoes for an extended period of time, let alone danced in them. But the arch and the outsides of my foot felt okay, so I decided I should go with that instead of buying a thirty dollar ankle brace (no, I’m not kidding about that, either) that might or might not help.
The only downside of the Vetrap I had was that it was purple. At some point during the first run of Act II today, I looked down and saw a very large blotch of purple on my foot. I was starting to freak out until I realized that the tongue of the shoe was sliding down the outside and I was looking at the top of my foot. Whew.
As much as I like purple, I don’t think it’d fit the color scheme for my costume. Thankfully, Fleet Farm sells black Vetrap. Not so thankfully, that section of the shelf was completely empty. Every single color was available except black. Shit.
I decided that my best second option was a dark blue: it shouldn’t look nearly as bright as red or pink under the lights. Or purple, for that matter. I’ll have to check my shoes once in a while, make sure the tongue isn’t sliding around, but I prefer that over going without any support and making my sprained foot worse. After all, walking like a cripple onstage is Tiny Tim’s job.
