My Current Battle: Gout

One month ago I returned to running after at 2-month hiatus, now another hiatus has started and the cause is gout. This has been one of the most painful things I have encountered in my life; gout gout go away!

The gout story started on May 24, 2017; I had went to bed feeling great but woke up with a slight pain in my big toe, nothing major, I dismissed it to "sleeping weird." I did my usual 3.5 km walk into work and usual walking around at work, at the end of the day I had my usual 10000 steps. Throughout the day the pain gradually intensified, when late evening rolled around I had to take 400 mg of ibuprofen every 6 hrs.  The pill popping continued for a couple of days, the pain intensified and eventually swelling of my big toe occurred. Eventually the swelling was so 

bad that only one of my many Salomon running shoes would actually fit on my gout-infected foot. Finally, I visited my doctor who prescribed painkillers, which gave me the side effect of intense headaches. Blood work showed that I have normal levels of uric acid (357 mg/L), high levels are considered anything above 420 mg/L, so the doctor said that gout wasn't my problem; he was wrong. People with "normal" levels can still undergo gout attacks, as this scientific article has shown. All of my symptoms suggest that it is gout, and my father has gout, and my cousins too. Doctor #2 confirmed this diagnosis on June 3. 

After spending about 3 weeks of experiencing gout pain and many hours reading this reddit forum on gout; I have finally found a treatment that works for me; soaking my foot in really warm water. Apparently this dissolves the sodium urate crystals, which are precipitated in the joints and tendons. Chemically, this makes sense because the solubility of sodium urate increases with temperature (it jumps from 6.0 mmol/L to 6.8 mmol/L when the temperature increases from 35 C to 37 C). Increasing the temperature of my foot by 15 C - 20 C should see a drastic increase in solubility of sodium urate and dissolution of its crystals. After 3 days of soaking in warm water for about 40 mins per day, the gout pain (feels like a hot knife in your foot) is gone away and I mostly just have joint tenderness. I have another appointment with Doctor #2 tomorrow; I am hoping for some sort of medication that I can take when I feel an attack is about to happen. Hopefully next week there will be another post titled, "my return to running."

Uric Acid, the enemy.