“You have gout, my friend,” she said.

“I have what?”

It seemed impossible — I’d been vegan almost five years to the day my foot blew up. I’d heard of gout, sure, listening to Ben Franklin’s character sing, “A farmer, a lawyer, and a sage/A bit gouty in the leg” on the “1776” Broadway cast album. But I thought it was something kings in the 18th century contracted from overdoing the mutton.

According to the pamphlets my podiatrist gave me, though, gout is something some middle-aged people, mostly men, get from eating large amounts of red and organ meats, shellfish, consuming too much beer, not looking after their weight, or a combination thereof. None of this applied to me except the age thing. My blood test confirmed the doctor’s suspicions; monosodium urate monohydrate crystals had gathered at my ankle like unwanted relatives.

The cortisone allowed me to walk normally by the next morning and in my mind, the doctor had “fixed” the problem. But over the next three years I would suffer increasingly ferocious, unexpected attacks in both ankles, both big toes and both knees. The flare-ups sometimes lasted weeks despite flooding my body with as much water as I could hold, popping a daily crystal-busting allopurinol, and following a prescribed, puzzling diet.

No more quail or pigeon? Fine. But black beans, spinach, asparagus, raisins, chickpeas and hummus, all heart-healthy stuff I’d been eating for years, had to go, too. The first cortisone shot I got was also my last, not only because of my memory of that needle, but because cortisone, used long-term, can cause a variety of problems including damage to the cartilage near the injection and I am a very active person, or was when I got my first attack. There was nothing to do, finally, but shake hands with this new, unplanned and unwelcome Thing in my body, then fight it with everything I had.

I read all I could find about gout and pain management, following instructions to breathe, to be still, to “be with the pain,” to give it a name, a shape and a color — and to “center.” I got my daily exercise, too; when my knees, feet or ankles were swollen to three times their normal size, I used dumbbells to do curls, flies, military presses and other weighted exercises while seated on a bench, my cane on the floor next to me. I saw no choice — I had a life to live, articles to write, money to earn, songs to sing, family to see and friends to socialize with. I made no public announcement on any social network. I just felt I had to limp forward and not let gout destroy everything else in my life.