I Stopped Fighting My Feet. That's When Things Started to Change.

I used to lie in bed for an extra thirty seconds every morning just to prepare myself. Not scrolling my phone. Not hitting snooze. Just lying there, staring at the ceiling, knowing what was coming the moment my feet touched the floor.

That stab through the heel. The one that makes you catch your breath and grab whatever's closest. I'd had it for so long I'd stopped thinking of it as pain, exactly. It had become more like a toll. Something you pay to start the day.

I'm a paramedic. I work 12-hour shifts, mostly nights, out of a station in Western Sydney. My feet are not optional equipment. They are the job. You can't respond to a cardiac arrest from a chair, and nobody cares that your arch is on fire when someone needs CPR on a kitchen floor at 3am.

So I didn't talk about it. I just kept going.

Before I knew what it was

It started the way these things usually do. Gradually, then all at once.

I'd been on a run of long shifts, covering for two people out sick, when I first noticed a tightness in my right heel that didn't go away after a day off. I assumed it was overuse. I bought new boots. I rested when I could, which in my job means sitting in the ambulance between calls, not exactly therapeutic.

By month three, the tightness had become a throb. By month six, it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. Not what shift I was on. Not whether I'd remembered to eat. My heel.

Eventually someone gave it a name: plantar fasciitis. Inflammation of the thick band of tissue that runs along the bottom of your foot. Common in runners. Common in people who stand for long periods. Very common, it turns out, in shift workers who wear heavy boots on hard ambulance bay concrete for six years running.

I looked it up. I read everything. I understood the mechanism, roughly: the fascia tightens overnight, and that first step forces it to stretch suddenly under full bodyweight. That's the stab. It made logical sense. Understanding it, though, did absolutely nothing to make it hurt less.

The things I tried

I want to be honest about this part, because I think a lot of people with chronic pain live through some version of it and never say it out loud.

There's a phase where you're optimistic. You try the things. You do the calf stretches in the kitchen every morning, the frozen water bottle under your foot while you watch TV, the new insoles, the compression socks that make you look like you're training for something you're definitely not training for. You read articles. You follow advice. You genuinely believe each new thing might be the one that finally works.

I bought two different brands of orthotic insoles. I had a cortisone injection that gave me six beautiful weeks of near-normal mornings before it wore off completely. I tried a night splint that kept my foot flexed while I slept, which would have been fine if I didn't work nights and sleep at unpredictable hours in a rotation that changes every fortnight.

I saw a physio. She was good. She gave me exercises that helped, incrementally, over months. But the progress was so slow and so uneven that some weeks I couldn't tell whether I was healing or just getting better at tolerating it.

And then there's the second phase. The one nobody talks about.

The phase where you stop being optimistic.

What chronic pain does to your head

This is the part I wasn't prepared for.

I work in emergency medicine. I have seen genuine suffering. I am not someone who struggles to put things in perspective. But there is something specific and insidious about pain that is always there. Not severe enough to stop you. Just present enough to colour everything.

My shifts got harder. Not the work itself, but the mental load of managing the pain around the work. I started calculating everything: how far I'd have to walk to reach a patient, whether I could park closer to the bay, whether my feet would hold up through the next call. I was doing my job, but I was doing it while simultaneously running a negotiation inside my own body.

Off shift, it was quieter but worse in different ways. I stopped making plans that involved being on my feet for long. I cancelled a camping trip with friends. I didn't go to my cousin's wedding properly, just sat at the back and left early. I watched myself getting smaller, and I told myself it was practical. Managing the condition. Being sensible.

It took me a long time to see that what I was actually doing was grieving something I hadn't named yet.

I was grieving the version of myself that didn't have to think about any of this.

The night I sat in the car and couldn't go in

About fourteen months into it, I arrived at the station for a night shift and couldn't make myself get out of the car.

Not because of the pain. The pain was a seven that night, which by then was unremarkable. I just sat there in the carpark for eleven minutes (I know because I checked my phone twice) and felt something I couldn't name at the time. I know now it was a kind of bottoming out. Not dramatic. Just a quiet, total exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep.

I eventually went in. I did the shift. I came home, took off my boots, and sat on the edge of my bed at seven in the morning with my feet on the cold floorboards and thought: something has to change. I don't know what. But this.

And here is where it gets complicated, because what changed wasn't the pain.

What changed was me.

The thing nobody puts in the treatment plan

I started, slowly and with some embarrassment, reading other people's accounts of living with foot pain. Not clinical articles. Personal ones. People describing their actual experience of waking up every morning and doing the calculation I had been doing for over a year.

I read about a nurse who'd had eleven years of it on hospital wards before she found something that genuinely helped. Her story is here, and it's worth reading in full, but what hit me before I even got to her solution was just her description of the cost. The way the pain had taken up residence not just in her feet but in her evenings, her energy, her presence with the people she loved.

She described it as the pain "taking everything." By the time she got home from a shift, there was nothing left.

I had been telling myself for months that I was coping fine. That I was managing. Reading that sentence, I realised I had been doing the same thing she had, and calling it something else.

What that article, and a few others like it, gave me wasn't a cure. It was something more useful in that moment: evidence that I wasn't being dramatic. That this thing was genuinely hard. That other people who were tough, capable, physically demanding professionals had found it genuinely hard too.

That sounds like a small thing. For me it was enormous.

Because until then, I had been adding a secondary layer of suffering on top of the primary one: the belief that I shouldn't be struggling as much as I was. That I was weak for letting it affect me. That a paramedic who can handle a trauma scene should certainly be able to handle a sore foot without it derailing her weekends.

Dropping that story didn't fix my feet. But it made the pain easier to carry. And it made me, for the first time in months, genuinely open to trying things again.

What openness looks like in practice

I want to be careful here, because this is not the part of the story where everything gets better. My feet still hurt. Some mornings are still bad. I still have shifts where by hour ten I am walking differently and hoping the next call doesn't involve stairs.

But I am not the same as I was in that carpark.

The change was partly physical. I started paying more attention to what happened to my feet between shifts, not just during them. I read about the overnight tightening cycle properly for the first time, the mechanics of why the fascia contracts during sleep and why that first step is always the worst. Understanding it as a cycle rather than a mystery made me feel less like my body was attacking me and more like there were specific points in the cycle where I could intervene.

I started spending a few minutes before bed doing something deliberate for my feet rather than just collapsing after a shift. Nothing complicated. Some gentle stretching. Standing on a textured surface for a few minutes to wake up the parts of my feet that twelve hours in rigid boots had put to sleep. It sounds almost laughably small against eighteen months of pain. And yet the mornings did start to change. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But the stab became a sting. The sting became, some mornings, just a stiffness that loosened within a minute or two.

I can't tell you whether that's the specific thing that helped or just time, or the physio exercises finally compounding, or some combination I'll never be able to untangle. I've stopped needing to know. What I can tell you is that I notice the difference on the nights I skip it versus the nights I don't.

The change was also partly something harder to name. I started treating my feet less like a problem to be solved and more like a part of my body that was asking for something specific. That shift in framing sounds soft, maybe even silly. But it changed how I engaged with every piece of advice, every new thing I tried. I stopped approaching them with the desperate hope that this one would be the fix, and the crushing disappointment when it wasn't complete. I started approaching them with something closer to curiosity.

Curiosity is survivable. Desperation isn't, not over a long haul.

What I know now that I didn't then

I know that chronic pain in shift workers is genuinely underdiscussed. The irregular hours, the hard surfaces, the physical demands, the complete impossibility of "just resting it" when your job doesn't permit rest: these things compound each other in ways that standard advice doesn't really account for. The advice written for nine-to-five office workers does not map cleanly onto a life where your schedule rotates every fortnight and your feet are your livelihood.

I know that the emotional weight of chronic pain is real and worth naming. Not as a weakness. As a fact. Something that hurts every day for eighteen months is going to affect you. Pretending it isn't is not resilience. It's just a different kind of suffering.

I know that openness, genuine openness to trying things without the pressure of needing them to be the complete answer, is the most useful state I've found for managing something that doesn't have a clean resolution. Some things have helped. Some haven't. I'm still figuring it out. I'm okay with still figuring it out.

And I know that the thirty-second ritual I do before bed most nights, the small, deliberate act of giving my feet some attention before they're expected to carry me through another twelve-hour shift, matters more than its size would suggest. Not because it has cured anything. Because it's an act of care that I had withheld from myself for a very long time, on the mistaken belief that I didn't deserve it until the problem was solved.

You don't have to be fixed to deserve care. That took me a long time to understand.

My alarm goes off at 4:45 for night shifts. I still take a breath before my feet hit the floor. Some mornings it's still hard. But I'm not dreading it the way I used to. I get up. I get out. I do the job.

That's enough. For now, that's genuinely enough.