Claire Henderson Facebook ad: “I Tell Patients To Get Surgery. I Was Terrified To Book My…”

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I've been telling patients surgery is the answer while secretly refusing to book it for myself. I'm a nurse. I've been saying it for nineteen years. And until recently, I don't think I fully understood what I was actually recommending. I work in a surgical recovery ward in Melbourne. I've been there long enough that bunion surgery is routine to me — the pre-op paperwork, the procedure, the eight weeks in a boot, the wound checks, the first time a patient tries to walk properly again and the face they make. I've sent women into that process without thinking twice about it. Then my own bunion started getting bad enough that surgery became the conversation I was having with my own GP. And something shifted. It wasn't fear exactly. It was recognition. I started noticing things I'd stopped registering on the ward. The woman who came back for her six-week check still moving like every step needed to be decided. The ones who asked quietly whether it could come back — and the answer I had to give them that was technically accurate and not particularly reassuring. The patient who'd had the procedure eighteen months earlier and was back in for the second foot and mentioned, almost in passing, that the first one wasn't quite right yet. My bunion had been building for eight years. Right foot. I'd watched it the way you watch something you know the clinical name for — categorising it, tracking it, telling myself I knew exactly where it was heading and what the options were. What I hadn't let myself feel was what it was actually like to live with. The aching through long shifts I managed with ibuprofen and didn't mention to anyone. The wider shoes I kept buying without acknowledging why. Keeping my shoes on in the changing room before and after shifts when everyone else didn't. Small things. The kind you stop noticing because they've just become how things are. I remember the day my GP said it clearly. I'd been expecting it. I knew from the angle, from the pain, from eight years of watching it progress exactly the way I'd watched it progress in others. I knew what he was going to say before I sat down. It still landed differently than I expected. My GP used the word surgery the same way I use it at work. Clinically. Without weight. I nodded. Asked the right questions. Thanked him. I made it out of the carpark before I had to pull over. I put my hands on the wheel and just — fell apart. Not loudly. Just this quiet, overwhelming thing that had been building for a long time and finally had somewhere to go. I kept thinking about what it actually meant — not for a patient, for me. The weeks off my feet. The boot. The pins. The forty percent chance it comes back within ten years. And then, underneath all of that, something I hadn't expected — I kept thinking about all the women I'd referred. How quickly I'd said it. How little I'd sat with what I was actually sending them into. I was forty-four years old and I was sitting in my car crying. The following weeks I didn't book the surgery. Not because I didn't have the time. Because I was petrified. I started looking for something — anything — that might mean I didn't have to. I knew the standard options. I'd recommended most of them. Wide shoes. Gel toe spacers from the chemist. Custom orthotics. I tried all of them the way you try things when you already suspect they won't work — methodically, without real hope. The spacers were soft gel. They compressed flat the moment I put weight on them and slid out by the end of a shift. The orthotics redistributed the load without changing anything about the actual joint. I wore them for four months. Nothing moved. They ended up in a bag at the bottom of my locker. I kept them because throwing them out felt like admitting something. By early this year I'd quietly accepted that I was going to have the surgery. I was just negotiating with myself about when. A colleague mentioned something in handover one morning. Not a recommendation — more an observation. She said she'd been using a toe spacer that had actually done something measurable. I told her I'd tried those. She described it like this — most spacers are like retainers. They hold your toe while you're wearing them and the moment you take them off you're back where you started. These worked more like braces. Actually moving things, not just holding them. Then she said they were different in two specific ways. When she told me what they were I just stood there for a second. That's it? I didn't look them up that day. I looked them up at 11pm that night when I couldn't sleep and those two things wouldn't leave me alone. The brand was called Alyyne. I read the whole page with the scepticism of someone who knows this category well enough to spot where things fall apart. I kept waiting for the part that didn't hold up. Two things stopped me. The first was the sizing — every spacer I'd ever tried or recommended was one size, built for some average foot that wasn't mine and wasn't most of my patients'. This was the first one that treated sizing as the actual problem. The second was the material — firm silicone that holds its shape under pressure and applies a constant outward force rather than compressing flat the moment your toes push back. Soft gel collapses. This didn't. Both things were so simple I almost laughed. I still wasn't sure. I'm trained to be sceptical of simple answers. But they offered a thirty-day full refund. No forms, no questions. After months of things I couldn't return, that felt like the only honest offer I'd seen. I ordered it. The first week I wore it after night shifts — thirty minutes on the couch before bed. I kept waiting for the part where it didn't perform. By the end of week two the aching I'd been managing daily with ibuprofen had dropped enough that I forgot to take it two days running. I noticed the absence before I understood what it meant. Week five a colleague asked if I'd changed my shoes. Week eight I went to the back of my wardrobe. The heels I hadn't worn in three years. I stood in my kitchen in them for twenty minutes. No pain. No counting down until I could take them off. I haven't booked the surgery. I don't think I'm going to. Six weeks ago I referred my first patient to Alyyne instead of the surgical consult. I've referred four more since. I spent nineteen years on the clinical side of this decision. The moment I was looking at it from the other side, everything felt different. The recovery I'd called routine. The recurrence rate I'd mentioned in passing. The women I'd sent into that process without sitting with what I was actually sending them into. If you're watching it get worse and you're not ready to be on the other side of that referral — this might be worth thirty days. Full refund if nothing changes. No questions. The link is below if you want to look.

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alyyne.com

I Tell Patients To Get Surgery. I Was Terrified To Book My Own.

Foot Health Australia Before Shoes Existed, Bunions Didn't Exist. My Doctor Told Me Mine Were Genetic. What I found after trying everything — and why it finally worked. By Claire Henderson, Registered Nurse — Melbourne Published June 2026 · 5 min read End of shift. The moment she'd been waiti...