My Shift Wasn’t Over. My Feet Were.

Every pair I have ever regretted felt brilliant on day one. That is not bad luck, it is the whole problem a shoe that hurts immediately never gets bought.

So you go by how they feel at the start, which is the one hour of the day that tells you nothing.

This is the sock line at the end of a long day. I did not put my sock on that tight.

Feet swell when you are upright for hours — it is ordinary and it happens to everyone who stands for a living. The problem is not the swelling. The problem is that a shoe is a fixed box, decided in a factory, and your foot at four o’clock never agreed to it.

Clogs cannot be adjusted at all. Laces you can loosen, but you have to sit down, unpick them and do them back up, and there is no point in a shift where that is convenient.

Ward vinyl over concrete. Kitchen tiles. Shop floors. Warehouse slabs. Every one of us with this problem works on something that does not absorb a single thing.

And standing still is worse than walking. Walking moves the load around the foot. Standing at a bedside for twenty minutes puts it in one place and leaves it there.

This is what the end of a shift looks like in our staff room. Everybody does it. Shoe off, thumb into the sole, three minutes, back out there.

I stopped asking colleagues what they wear and read what is actually published about footwear for feet that hurt. It is a short list and it is the same list everywhere.

Here is what stopped me short. My £430 of shoes managed one of the four. They were all cushioned. Not one was properly roomy at the front, and the pair I wore most, the clogs, could not be adjusted at all.

Nobody starts this job with a diagnosis. You collect one. And once you have been doing it long enough, the staff room stops being a place where people complain about their feet and starts being a place where everyone knows the words.

Here is the thing I did not expect when I actually looked them up. Six different names. Six different bits of the foot. And the footwear paragraph underneath each one is very nearly the same paragraph.

The burning was always in the same place. Across the ball of the foot, behind the toes. It is where the pressure ends up when a shoe narrows and a foot does not.

Mira does not come to a point. It stays broad right through to the end, so there is room in front of the toes at four o’clock and not only at nine.

The first week I kept expecting the burning to turn up on schedule. It is the strangest thing to notice the absence of something.

This is the one that actually changed my day, and it is the least impressive feature on the list.

One wide strap across the top of the foot. When things start feeling tight I let it out a notch, standing up, without sitting down, without touching a lace, in about two seconds. And in the morning I do it back up.

The shoe holds across the middle of the foot rather than gripping the toes to stay on — which, as the trust guidance says, is exactly the problem with a slip-on. My clogs had to be tight somewhere to stay on my feet at all, and that somewhere was the front.

I had written off anything called barefoot because I assumed it meant feeling every inch of the floor, and the floor is the thing I am trying to get away from.

There is a cushioned insole in these. Padding under the foot, and a sole that bends with the foot instead of being a stiff board underneath it.

Roomy and cushioned turned out not to be opposites. I had just never been offered both in the same shoe.

Pick up a nursing clog and then pick up one of these. I actually laughed.

It matters more than it sounds. You lift each shoe every single step, all day, and by the afternoon a heavy shoe makes you shorten your stride and scuff — which is its own kind of tired, on top of the feet.

Wet vinyl, a spill, the bit by the doors when it has been raining. You already walk carefully on a ward, and you walk more carefully still in a shoe you do not trust.

Mira has a proper lugged outsole across the whole sole. It is not a glamorous thing to care about and it took a fortnight before I noticed I had stopped doing the short, braced steps.

Here is my honest measure, and it is not a scientific one.

For years, the first thing I did when I got in the car was take my shoes off. Not to be comfortable for the drive to make it stop. Then I would walk into my own house barefoot and not put anything on again.

Five months in, I drive home in them. I come in, put the kettle on, and take them off when I actually feel like it rather than because I cannot stand them a second longer.