How I Got The Way I Did - Part One

I think its time I set down my own story of life with club feet. I will include all the various things I’ve done to alleviate my pain and discomfort – those that worked, and those that did not – along with the actual history, warts and all. I have decided to do this because of one thing. All my life, until quite recently, with the discovery of discussion groups on the Web, I have felt quite alone with this, what is actually more common than most of us know, my twisted, painful feet, that started as cudgels ( a synonym for clubs), and are only recently become “my feet.” For the longest time, I would look at my screaming dogs, and felt they were somehow not mine, somehow just strange apparatus’ attached to my legs. I will come back to this point a bit later.

I started as all members of Club Foot started: our parents stunned, poorly informed, worried sick their child would live as a cripple. I had all the usual surgeries and therapies: tendo-Achilles lengthening; anterior tibialis lateral transfers; V-osteotomies of the navicular, b/l; a later procedure on the left to remove a cyst that had grown over the transferred tibialis, that resulted in a ruptured tensor-retinaculum ( a fascial band that holds the tibialis close to the foot, and serves as a fulcrum around which the tibialis can pull up, or dorsiflex, the forefoot) which resulted in a very visible, and tight as a bow-string, tibialis that stuck out and rubbed against the inside of the tongue of my shoe to this very day.

As for the therapies: serial casting, which may have been the Ponsetti method, given the nature and the time at which it was done (early to mid-50’s), (I still have one of those casts today, that I kicked off in my infant urge to run, I suppose); night splints – Dennis Browns, then later, metal uprights with a calf band, to which were attached tight elastic straps that were attached at the other end to the front edges of the shoes I had to wear. These were a wonderful form of torture – they had solid steel bottoms – so that if I arose at night to go to the bathroom, I was basically Frankenstein waking the entire house with my clanking.

And then, of course, the day-time braces. As if the severely brown, lace-up, round-toed “Bozo Boots” weren’t enough fodder for the constantly applied humiliations enacted against me by the other kids at school, the braces really kicked all that hell up about a dozen notches. Especially the twister straps. These were inch-wide elastic bands, attached at one end to the outside toes of my shoes, then wound around my legs (under my pants) to finally arrive at and attach to a – I’m not exaggerating – girdle. You try going into the locker room to change for gym class without anyone noticing that.

There were others, I won’t bore those of you who’ve been there further with this. But the emotional impact of all this was equal to the physical torture, if not worse. I’ve been in therapy a very long time. I even had several episodes where I was beaten unconscious by schoolmates because a teacher had insisted I be included in a baseball game during recess. No, I am not exaggerating. It seems my final offense, besides being the cripple who no one wanted on their teams, was to miss catching a fly ball from third base that went, in fact, well over second base. Its always handy to have a rational explanation for these things.

Until I was 16, I went to the Detroit Orthopedic Clinic for the castings, bracing, physical therapy, and, to be put on parade. The DOC was a United Way supported clinic for all kinds of orthopedic problems, and served primarily those in the lower levels of the socio-economic layers of our great society. Included in this mix were children and adults whose deformities and afflictions were so severe at birth they had been institutionalized immediately after birth. I grew up surrounded by the single most diverse population of human beings to be found anywhere on Earth. Every color, every age, and every genetic and injury-scarred possibility of the human experience served as my earliest lessons in who we all are in this world, and it wasn’t what my siblings and schoolmates, and even my own parents believed it to be. It set me off on a path none of my family could understand, let alone follow. I could actually write a book about that place, and may do so eventually, but not here.

And until I was 16, every single pair of shoes I was allowed to wear were brown, round-toed, lace-up, Bozo boots. I hated them. But from 16 till about 22 years of age, I was on my own. Shoe stores terrified me, because finding anything to fit was nearly impossible. Until I learned about Swiss-made hiking boots. Which were strong enough to support my feet. And which were, you guessed it, round-toed, lace-up, high-top Bozo boots. I would buy those old style leather Dr. Scholls arch supports – two or three at a time – and stuff those into the boots, and then stuff my feet into them. I often added ace-wraps for those really special times.

By that I mean, the times I did really stupid things to prove I was “normal.” Let’s see, where to start? Well, I walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back with a forty-pound pack on my back. I had to be carried the last four hundred feet, and was unable to walk at all for nearly a week. But who cares – I did it! And there was the time I walked the entire Lost Coast of California, all 47 miles of it – alone (ill advised even for the strongest hiker) – and took ten days rather than the advised four to five, because on the third day, I slipped crossing a early spring rain-swollen creek and sprained the holy hell out of my left foot. You see, I didn’t really believe the people who told me this wasn’t the best season for such a trek, as the King’s Range, the mountain range to my immediate east as I walked south along the beaches and bluffs, was very full of snow, all in the process of melting quite rapidly. You see what being a stubborn SOB will get you?

There was much more of this kind of insanity, and is largely to blame for much of the subsequent joint deterioration I went on to experience in the following years. I was intent on showing the world (like the world was actually looking!) that I could do what anyone else could do. The problem was, I really couldn’t, not without some fairly serious results. So, finally convinced I needed to find some solutions for my pain, I hatched my brilliant plan. I would become a – yeah – shoemaker. By the late 20th Century, there were fewer than 100 bespoke shoemakers left in the US. This was compared to the start of the 20th Century, when there were literally thousands of them, both in factories, and in the down towns and village squares of most communities in the country. So, as you can see, I was planning for a truly bright future. My career path was now set in, well, quicksand. It took me four years of looking for a teacher before I realized I needed a plan B. So I took another year to find and convince a cobbler (a shoe repair guy) to take me on as an apprentice. While others my age were moving ever closer to the computer era, I was moving backwards in time. But, at least it was a plan.

End of Part 1