I was walking home from work on a June day. I passed by a house. A mother and her little girl were eating lunch out on their deck. I have a job where I go home for lunch because I’m close enough, that’s not really part of this story. As I walk by the girl asks her mom “Why is he walking like that?” I never heard the mom’s answer. In my head I said, “you should have seen how it was before I got everything fixed.” My right foot used to point inward so that my pinky toe was directly in front of me when I walked. I kept walking. How could she know what the right answer to that quesiton would be when she knows nothing of me or my context of life? The truth of it is that the way that I walk is a result of many things. There was the surgery I had in 1994 on both achilese tendons to have them lengthened. That’s right, I do have two feet. Then in 2001 I ahd to have a tendon transfer in my right foot to correct that turning in thing I was talking about. Now it points in a normal direction, which is great. I also had my achilese tendon lengthened again at that point in time just on the right foot. My left foot was fine. The tendon transfer and second lengthening were all good things. My tendency to forget to do my exercises caused my right ankle to kind of freeze up compared to the left one. It still moves, just not quite as much. Sometimes, it can appear as if I’m walking with a limp. It’s not just this one thing that has contributed to this though. All of my bike accidents and almost every time I’ve slipped and fallen on the ice has also contributed to it. I can’t blame it for not really wanting to move out of sheer terror as to what might happen next.
Now you know.