If I tell you that I have a blister on my foot, then obviously you’re going to draw on your own experiences of the same thing in order to visualise or imagine it. But if then in the same breath, I tell you that a blister on my foot is enough to land me on crutches – or in a wheelchair back when I was at school – because the poor circulation and diminished sensation in my feet mean that it’s going to take ages to heal and is therefore vulnerable to infection, I’ve sort of showered with big words and abstract concepts, so you can’t really understand what I mean because you’ve got no direct experience of the same thing.

But so what? Why would you need to fully engage with this aspect of my disability anyway?

Well, I mean, you don’t really need to if you’re not very close to me. But then again, I’ve been left in a wheelchair or with infections because of people- including (though not limited to) friends, nurses, and security guards – hearing the word ‘blister’ and totally dismissing it as a big deal because it wouldn’t be if it was on their foot. Therefore, it’d probably help a lot of disabled people if everyone was encouraged to gain a little perspective on the delicacy and temperamentality of disability.

I effectively have a wound on my foot which I do my best every day to not fully reopen. And I use the word ‘fully’ here because this wound is never totally healed. It’s an opening in scar tissue from having three operations on the same foot to correct its positioning and improve the way I walk – I had three of the same type of operation (tendon transfers) because the first ended with a very dramatic infection, the second didn’t work, and the third kind of worked but by that point, I had no tendon left to transfer…These operations all happened in the years up until about 7. That scar tissue healed and fully closed when I was 18. Then it opened right back up again about six months later and is still open now.

Another caveat for you though, when I say that it’s ‘open’, I don’t mean some gory, bloody, oh my god that makes me feel a bit sick situation. Basically, on the side/bottom of my foot, I have these dots where the scar isn’t shut, which bleed, but are covered by a layer of hard skin – I guess, kind of like if you put a flat plate of glass on some paint. If I’m lucky, the dots are the size of a pinhead and the blood is black (therefore, not bleeding), but the dots can get bigger if pressure has been applied (i.e. by walking too much), and the blood moves through the gaps, and occasionally the blood is pushed to then form a blister. If it’s really bad, then there’s no blister at all; I just bleed from the center of the scar tissue. And it’s never fully healed because I walk on it: since that’s kind of how you use feet.

So I guess, technically, my foot is always bleeding – except for that six months when I was 18 – but it’s only a problem when that blood breaks through the glass layer of skin and reaches my sock. Under the glass, I can see it, but it’s not open and therefore vulnerable to infection; out of the glass…well, bacteria can get to it and cause some issues.

However, I can’t feel my feet; I take care of them purely by sight. I can see when a blister is about to develop, or if an infection is brewing, but the second I’m not looking, I don’t know what’s going on. This means that I look all the time, though I’ll be honest and say that sometimes I just won’t look because sometimes I don’t want to see the spiderweb of blood on the side of my foot. Instead, I’ll feel it with my hand for blisters, and if there aren’t any, I’ll spare myself the somewhat threatening image for a day.

This small part of my body is ridiculously delicate and yet it holds so much power over my life. I go to regular appointments to keep the glass layer of skin over the scar strong enough to not break, but thin enough to not cause blisters itself, and still, the weather, the condition of my footwear, and the amount of walking I do can create a crack or cause it to build up too much so that the next time I take off my shoes I’m greeted by a circle of blood on my sock. Always love that.

I could go on for hours speaking about the experiences I’ve had with this part of my body; the times when it’s caused me intense grief, frightened me, or deeply irritated me, but that’s for other blogs. What I want you to take away from these paragraphs, is (hopefully) the knowledge of why I can spontaneously end up on crutches when yesterday you saw me walking; why I can tell you that I’ve got a blood blister on my foot but walk and seem exactly the same as last week when I had ‘no problem at all’. But most of all, I want you to know that even when I don’t have a blister or an infection, that’s because I look at my foot religiously to ensure that those things don’t happen.

Life with a disability isn’t one set of simple, fixed symptoms that manifest in exactly the same way daily. I’m not stressed or upset about my foot every day because I’m used to it, and because I do a lot to make sure that it doesn’t need to cause me stress or upset every day. But if you take away or change one part of this foundation my parents and I have built my life on – like my shoes, my chiropody, or my car – then I wouldn’t be able to be everything that I am or do everything that I do.

So like I said, it’s delicate.