Not dancing yet, but I will

Remember that Springsteen Concert, I went to?  Well, right after I came back to St. Paul, my big toe started hurting and my left foot swelled up.  I couldn't bend the toe and it hurt to put weight on it without wanting to collapse.  At first, I wrapped an Ace bandage around it and tried to tough it out, figuring it would figure itself out.  After a week, though, I couldn't take it anymore and went to a Clinic to have a person smarter than myself deal with it.  The doctor who looked at it said it could be three things.  It could be a stress fracture, severe tendinitis, or it could be gout.  And she was sure it was gout.
For those of you who don't know, gout is a condition caused by the build-up of uric acid in the blood stream, and it commonly flairs up after someone indulges in high-protein foods and/or alcohol.  Given that I had noticed the symptoms right after going to Chicago and indulging in some amazing food and more than a bit of alcohol, the diagnosis made a lot of sense.  But, we wouldn't know for sure without a blood test, which I would have to come back for next week.  She seemed pretty sure it was gout though.  I hoped to hell she was wrong.
Gout, as you probably know, is not curable.  It's a disease that once you have it, you keep having recurrences of it throughout your life.  Which means you need to avoid alcohol and protein.  And that does not sound like a lot of fun.  But more than that, I really did not want to believe I could have something at this age that could not be cured.  I didn't want to believe that my body was defective, for lack of a better word.  I know my body will turn on me at some point and I'll get some condition, disease, or problem that I won't have any choice but to deal with for the rest of my life.  But, I didn't want to believe I was old enough for that to start happening now.  Which is ridiculous, but that has not stopped me from believing irrational things in the past and I doubt it's stopping me now.
The doctor prescribed some anti-inflammatory meds, which is apparently the treatment for any of the problems it could be and I scheduled a follow-up visit with my regular doctor.  In the interim, I wore around a walking boot for a couple of days, which aggravated my back and made me feel even older and more infirmed.  I was miserable.  I take walking around, dancing*, and general mobility for granted and this was pointing out to me how important those things are to me and my sense of well-being.
By the next week, the inflammation and swelling had gone down and I was in much better shape.  It still hurt, but it was better.  We did the blood test and he examined the joint that was the problem and he decided that I had merely sprained my toe joint, which most likely happened when I was dancing at the Springsteen concert--Wrigley Field had exacted its revenge on me once again. 
I say merely a sprain, because it's better than gout, but it was a really good sprain.  Luckily the same anti-inflammatory medication was the right way to go and all that was necessary was to rest it and do some physical-therapy-style exercises.  So that's good news.  And in fact, things now are almost all back to normal.  I've been wearing some spiffy tennis shoes to school for a couple weeks and that's helped insulate my foot and I'm doing my exercises.  I'm probably at 85% now.  Not dancing yet, but I will soon.
*Note 1.  Not good dancing, but dancing around my house when I'm feeling good or when I need to feel good.  Or just for whatever.  This is generally not the kind of dancing I would inflict on others.