In Which The Braces May Make the Woman

Ah, feet. I've always hated feet. Feet are disgusting. They stink. They're ... feet. Gross.

In particular I've always hated my own feet. They're mutant. On top of the insult of inheriting my father's almost obscenely ugly toes, I have displaced metatarsophalangeal (MTP) joints in the big toes on both feet (bunions, kind of like), and rigid contractures in the proximal interphelangeal joints on the little toes of both feet, and plantarflexion/pronation/flat-footed issues. The pictures I'm about to show you are not of my own feet, because just ... no. But thanks to the wealth of information on the Internet, I can give you an idea of what I'm talking about, thus: 

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

Now put all that together, eh?

The bottom line is, my feet are horrid, they're starting to seriously bother me, and they need to be fixed.

The first thing I noticed was the swelling. My feet are never the size they should be anymore -- now they're one to three times larger, depending on the circumstance, and when I walk, my toes curl tight and I'm almost always going along on the outsides of my feet. THAT, at least, has been true since I learned to walk 25 years ago, but the swelling -- and the pain -- is new. So I took myself off to the doctor today, la di limpin' da, and now I have referrals to both a podiatrist and an orthopedist. Lovely. I wish I could say I'm more enthused.

Apparently what's happening is this: age. The doctor was very emphatic at saying that at 29 I am certainly not old, but comes a point when one's feet don't give a damn how you've walked on their crookedness and been fine for a quarter century: tissue starts tearing and fissuring and letting fluid build up. "Repeated micro traumas" she called it.

My mother was the first to refuse the surgery to fix this, and then when the surgeon asked me, I refused it too -- after all, my feet had worked well enough up to that point (18 years); what reason had I to think they wouldn't continue working? 

"They're going to bother you someday," said the surgeon, and, "Talk to me then," said I.

Ah, the foibles of youth. Or maybe not?

After all, I've seen pictures of this surgery. It's horrid. It involves breaking the feet, setting them straight, and then fixing them into place with rods. And I ask you, WHO THE HELL WANTS TO GO THROUGH THAT?! Also, according to people who've had it done, it's excruciatingly painful for months, and if you should happen to walk too much ever again, there's a danger of walking the rods out of place. It makes me sad to admit there's probably not much chance of that particular complication at this point, but it certainly would have been an issue 11 years ago.

Of course, there's always a chance it won't come to surgery. There's always bracing -- there are all kinds of new bracing techniques now that I will certainly try first, even though most of the splints look like Medieval torture devices and I have a feeling they'll make my feet hurt even worse than they already do. I had leg braces with corrective toe straps as a teenager, and they made my feet hurt so much I could barely hobble. At my first appointment after leaving home, I admitted to my specialist that I never wore them and she might as well stop ordering them put on to my AFOs. Then I stopped wearing my AFOs altogether because there was no one to make me, and THAT was a, "young and stupid" mistake FOR SURE.

So it looks like one of the first steps will be getting new AFOs. Part of me is looking forward to this, strangely enough -- maybe, in spite of appearances, the new kinds of corrective attachments won't be so bad after all. Maybe they'll actually help. I can hope, right?

In an effort to make myself feel better -- and to cushion the blow to my ego from the insistence of my ego when I was 18, which is now biting me in the feet, ha ha, bad pun, and irony be damned -- I'm giving serious consideration to the color and/or design I'd like on these future new braces of mine. I'm thinking purple. Lots of purple. Definitely purple, maybe with lavender swirly bits ...