First Foot Walk 10.14.2010

I don't know if my feet have feelings, but I think they felt relief today. Earlier today I had taken off my sandals – surreptitiously dubbed “Gladiators” by some pretentious hipster somewhere – because my calves hurt so much from running last night. The irony is that I took off my shoes to ease leg pain only to discover that the floor hurt so much more! I'm realizing how tender my bourgeois feet are, and I'm anticipating with great anxiety the development of strong calluses on my feet - anything to make the pain go away! There’s this one spot, a path rather, in front of the College of Business Administration building that is made up of sharp rocks that cut into your feet a little bit more with every step forward. This building, this path, is supposed to represent the path I follow to my future because I am a Business major. If I were to walk this path without calluses, I don’t know if I could stand the pain without giving up. 


After walking on concrete and jagged rock for few hours, I was able to walk on carpet in the library, which resulted in a peculiar sort of ecstasy, as I could still feel the dull throbbing from the walk before, but only realized how much pain I was in  when I stood on the spongy surface of the library carpet and the intense pain subsided momentarily. When I dared to look at the bottom of my feet, they were red and raw from the hot pavement and the skin was dry and cracking and my feet all over were covered in dirt. Needless to say, I was a little freaked out, and for good reason too. According to an article in the New York Times, walking barefoot with a cut or crack on the bottom of my foot makes me much more vulnerable to infection. (Hartocollis.) Also, walking on wet grass - even though it feels SO GOOD -  "can damage the skin's natural barrier, allowing infections to take hold, said Dr. Giuseppe Militello, an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at Columbia University." (Hartocollis.) Walking barefoot in the grass, I'm likely to catch a couple different infections like athlete's foot, or plantar warts. Additionally, I am likely to get infected with hookworms if "bare areas of skins such as bare feet or the torso come in contact with soil contaminated with [hookworm] larvae", which is shed in the feces of infected dogs or cats. (Marx, abstract.) Apparently, the right conditions for a nasty infection can be found in "many manicured city parks... where the grass is moist and shaded, well-watered by automatic sprinkler systems, and well-trampled by thousands of feet, shod and unshod, human and animal, carrying countless infectious organisms." (Hartocollis.) So if anything, my lesson learned is to avoid damp soil and grass! That's just as well because walking on wet surfaces softens my feet, which makes it hurt even more when I start to walk on concrete again.




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Works Cited 

Hartocollis, By Anemona. "Barefoot in the Park? Watch Your Step - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 26 May 2008. Web. 16 Oct. 2010. . 

Marx, M B. "Parasites, Pets, and People." Prim Care 18.1 (1991 Mar): 153-65. MEDLINE. Web. 15 Oct. 2010.