10,000 page views

I remembered making a post back way when saying something about 10,000 page views and lo and behold that is exactly what has now happened.

http://ledderhose.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/1000-page-views-on-plantar-fibromas.html

Back then I said I would do my favourite posts over the time it has taken to amass those views and I think that is exactly what I am going to do. An interesting thing though is that it took me 3 months to get those first 1000 views and then in the last 4 months I have had 9000 page views. Not only that but on the 15th March I passed 3000 page views so that means 7000 page views in just over 3 months. Thank you everyone for visiting and thank you to both the British Dupuytren's Society for their help and links here and also for the International Dupuytren's Society who have recently added me. (I am excluding posts done before the last one I linked to above)

1) Interview with Becky - 

This interview might not be the best interview that I have done and it might not have been the most informative that I have done but it is the first one and it started a real trend as I now have more than 10 interviews and have chatted with patients from all sorts of backgrounds and whom have had all sorts of treatments. I don't want to post more than one interview so I would also like to mention here the interview with my wife who has been so supportive and this leads me on nicely to my next post.

2) The wedding - 

So this is one of my favourite posts as I am talking about the wedding and this was an amazing time and I had very little pain on the honeymoon and it was just 2 of the best weeks of my life and everyone was so kind and I am so happy to be married to my wonderful wife. 

3) Radiation Treatment - 

This is a post that I did about the treatment of Ledderhose and Dupuytren's using radiotherapy. This is one of my favourites because I found lots of positives and I am now getting radiotherapy so this is an important post if not a favourite one.  

I am also going to mention that I have had a lot of hits on here from Google and this is reflected in the search results. The great thing is that most of the hits are from search engines are clearly relative hits coming mainly from the search of Ledderhose disease or slight variations.

I think I am going to leave it at that, I know that is not many posts but I have done a lot of treatment posts and interviews and I really just wanted to do one of each.

Pain, wedding photos, contracture and more to come

I want to start today's post by saying that I am again in a lot of pain by the end of the day when walking and actually it took a while to go away even once I was sitting down. It really was quite bad again, probably the worst that it has been since I got the orthotics, is this the end of the orthotics helping or is it just a blip as I get used to walking again after 2 weeks off for the wedding.... I am sure it is the latter otherwise I am going to be in a lot of pain for a while to come.

We also got wedding pictures and they look great and I think that it really shows on our faces what a wonderful day we had and I actually remember thinking that my foot didn't really hurt that day but what the photos are telling me is that I just pushed that to the back of my mind as in all of the photos where you can see my feet my left foot is in its classic on the side pose and this does not bother me one bit as I didn't notice it on the day you cannot see any pain on my face which is just covered with love and happiness.

One of my best men from the wedding commented on how often when he asks me how my foot is I go "eh ok" and then he reads on here that in fact I was in a lot of pain that day. Well this is because it is really bad from about 3pm onwards. Something like shown in the graph below:

 I am tempted to start doing this on a daily basis and also take into account the amount of time I am spending on my feet so that I have accurate (albeit down to my own judgement) figure on this and can actually say "well this is what happens to me". Anyway I doubt I will remember how to do it let alone actually get round to putting it all together but I will try.

So onto the main topic for today: (I do have a second one ready on paper but no time to type it up so I have a post ready for tomorrow :-)  )

I came across this: Dupuytren's disease in the feet causing flexion contractures in the toes

I have to say that this is the first time that I have seen it referred to as Dupuytren's (DD) in the feet and it does explain what it is nicely for those who have heard of Dupuytren's which is much more common than Ledderhose. In this case study from 1996 they look at two cases where they observe that contracture of the toes. This is interesting as this is considered to be very rare in Ledederhose and is a trait that is much more linked to DD. Interestingly what they mean by this is actually curling of the toes rather than the lack of flexibility like I have in my toes as shown here video toes don't move.

Some things that I got from this paper / case report were:

• Both patients smoked - This has been linked to Ledderhose before but is not really been proven and is certainly not an issue in my case. 
• Both have a family history of the disease which again is not an issue in my case but I am however interested in the genetics aspect of this and I am in contact with several people who have a family history and I am hoping I will be able to compile these together. If you had a black blob for a person with disease and a white blob for a family member without disease then mine would look like a load of white blobs with one black one (in case you can't guess that's me). 
• Again they mention that LD is an uncommon manifestation as I have discussed before. They also say that it is most common in men in their 40s and 50s. 

As I said above I did come across another useful paper which is actually a review for DD and I will hopefully cover this tomorrow. 

Well I certainly hope that someone out there is finding some of my posts useful and I hope that they continue to follow and support this. I am looking forward to working my way through the book and all of the papers that I keep finding. 

Wedding preperations

So today was quite a painful day. I do not think that this was because of yesterday when I was on my feet quite a lot but rather I think that this was because of the time that we had to spend on our feet at the wedding venue trying to decorate the place.

The decorations in the evening room was left down to me and I wasn’t sure what we wanted to do as we didn't really want to spend lots of money but at the same time I wanted them to look great, really great. It was actually my idea in the end and something that I have put a lot of effort into making look great. We have round the outside of the room lots of photos of me and my partner starting at opposite ends as babies and then meeting in the middle.  The completed effect is fantastic and it was about my best idea for the wedding and I cannot wait for tomorrow.

My foot is being really bad and I am hoping that tomorrow is ok, I am taking trainers to change into if I need to at the end of the photos as I am not sure how supportive the shoes are and they are not going to help my Ledderhose too much compared to the same things in my trainers.