I was born with clubbed feet, which means that my feet were turned inward (also called “pigeon-toed”), and my achiles tendons (heel cords) were very short, pulling my heels up to the backs of the calves of my legs. It was not known before I was born that I would have this condition, because ultrasounds were not very common at that time.
When my parents discovered my problem, they sought medical help. The doctor they took me to put me in corrective casts when I was ten days old. Every week, I was put in new casts to continue the correction, and it was working. But my family moved from that town when I was six months old, and the move took us far enough from my doctor that a referral was needed. And that’s where the trouble began.
The new doctor employed methods that would “correct” my feet more quickly than the casts. I was put in shoes with a bar between them to force my feet outward, and was given a number of treatments to quickly correct my feet. The problem was that the corrective methods were moving my bones too quickly. The result was overcorrection.
When I started learning to walk, my parents noticed that I was walking on the insides of my ankle bones, not entirely on the bottoms of my feet. They addressed this problem with the doctor, but he insisted that my feet were corrected, and that all of the treatments he had prescribed had been to appease my parents.
My parents were furious, and talked to experts about whether to file a malpractice suit. They were told that, unfortunately, because no surgeries had been performed and that the bones of children my age (at the time) changed so dramatically over time, it would be nearly impossible to prove their case and win.
In the next couple of years that followed, my parents found out about the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, and made an appointment for me to be evaluated. My situation was severe, and the Chief of Staff took up my case, hoping he could help me. By this time, my ankles had begun to slide inward, and were threatening to slide off of my feet if something wasn’t done to stop the process.
Beautiful Feet 
When I was a baby I wore a pair of those braces with the metal bar holding the shoes apart from each other. I can remember laying there practically immobile, screaming at the top of my lungs trying to get them to take it off. But they didn’t use it very long and my toes still turn inward to this day. My shoes wear out faster because the weight isn’t evenly concentrated when I walk. I can remember kids making fun of me in grade school, mimicking the way I walked, and my Great-Grandmother constantly urging me to “throw your feet outward when you walk” all through childhood and high school.
By: Tim Schenks on September 29, 2007
at 2:37 pm
I don’t remember wearing the bar as much as I do going through the surgeries I did. Did doctors ever do anything more for you than just make you wear that brace? Have you sought help for the problems that plague you even now?
By: mrstswede on September 29, 2007
at 9:08 pm
No, nothing further was done.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a plague. My shoes wear out quicker and my shins hurt sometimes from walking too far. They’ve called it pigeon-toed but it doesn’t look as bad as the club foot I’ve seen on some of the websites. More of an in-turning I guess it’s called.
By: Tim Schenks on September 30, 2007
at 6:23 am
Pigeon-toe and clubbed foot are the same thing, as far as I know. There are varying degrees of clubbed feet, and a lot of what you’ll find on the web is the more severe form. Mine was considered by the chief of staff at the Shriners Hospital to be the worst he’d ever seen in the early 1980s. Yours might not be very severe.
I’ve had problems with shoes wearing out quickly, too. Corrective inserts have helped in the past when my doctor had prescribed them, but I have experienced that problem, too. My present doctor has recommended a couple of brands of shoes that he says are the best, other than having your shoes custom-made, and one of those brands is New Balance. Of course, if you need dressier shoes, you’ll have to look elsewhere, but New Balance seems to hold up rather well for me.
By: mrstswede on September 30, 2007
at 12:38 pm