The Blackburn Digest

Sometimes, I get the wicked urge to make an appointment with my former podiatrist. To just tell the scheduling clerk something banal like “I’m having trouble with callouses”, and then watch the podiatrist’s face when I unveil my new feet. O.K. - they’re not “new”. They are officially almost 15 months old, but the urge to use them as a “teaching tool” grows ever stronger!

It’s not the podiatrist’s fault. When years of Rheumatoid Arthritis had dislocated my toes and set them all at weird angles that shoes could no longer encase without severe pain, I sought her out. She was the daughter of a trusted physician, newly set up in practice with her surgery-schooled husband. I received sympathy, custom orthotics to ease my stride (which they didn’t) and, eventually, braces attached to both shoes with knee-cuffs to minimise my spectacular falls (which they did). Pain and mobility were still issues, however, so I kept pushing the young pair for a better fix. At my last visit to their office, I was told that the only solution was “drastic surgery” that “shouldn’t be considered until I was older”. That made little sense to me at the time (it was 2004 or 2005); if it was drastic surgery, shouldn’t we do it when I was younger and better able to recover? They wouldn’t answer that, so I didn’t visit them anymore!

When I had my post-op checkup, the surgeon told me to go see the orthotics/prosthetics group and have them fabricate toe fillers & carbon fiber shanks for me. Uh oh! The toe fillers (prosthetic toes) will prevent the front part of whatever shoes I wear from curling up like Persian slippers in short order. O.K. - preventing curling is a good thing, but the alarm bells went off.

I have been visiting the wonderful, caring staff at HK Orthotics & Prosthetics for several years now. They are a terrific bunch, and I like them immensely. However, I delayed for two days before calling for an appointment because I knew what they would have to do! When I whined about it at home. . . .”They’re going to have to take molds of my feet. They’re going to press down on the stitches (and the rest of my feet) to get a clear mold in semi-rigid foam!”, I was met with ‘comforting disbelief’ by family members. “Maybe not.”, “You don’t know that.”, “I don’t think so; this is different.”, etc.