Feet of Clay
Back when I was in my thirties, I recall having a problem with my feet. Having always been big in the extreme, it did not surprise me that my feet might give me trouble. There are very few parts of the body that can directly connect on a cause and effect basis to something like size. When I was a freshman at prep school, specifically Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine, I was obliged to sign up for a sport each of the three seasons. I had played Freshman Football in the fall. I signed up for Skiing in the winter, but was disappointed to find out that until it snowed, we had to run a three mile loop around the school every afternoon. The first five finishers on the loop got excused from the next day’s run. There was no hope for me to ever make the top five, but I also had to finish the run every day or else I would get marked absent, which, on a cumulative basis would be a big problem (I don’t remember the cost of truancy, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have like it). After a few weeks of trudging around that loop, all in the days before high-tech running gear, I started to get shin-splints. If you have never had shin-splints they are a painful ache of the shins caused by the pounding or running. Luckily for me and my shins, it snowed and I could stop running and start skiing.
When the spring athletic season began, I signed up for JV tennis and was looking strong enough to make the first team. I always took great pride in being quicker than people expected. In tennis, and later in squash, if I could limit my movements to no more than three steps I could compete with the best of them. Size can be quick for short spurts and it worked well for me in tennis. I was also a fair racquet handler in both sports, so I was competitive. We played on old concrete courts because the varsity team used all the school’s better, clay courts. If you’ve played tennis you know that clay is a soft surface and concrete was not. The bounce is probably harder on clay since it is more variable, but the clay is easier on the feet since you could slide rather than stop hard on every shot. The combination of the softer surface and the sliding made clay a much better surface for extended play. It’s why older players prefer clay, and it has the added advantage of setting up the ball so that they can get to the ball and keep it in play better. Eventually, playing hard each afternoon on concrete courts started to take its toll on me. I would lie in bed each night and my lower extremities would throb and keep me awake for hours. I finally had to go to the school doctor since it got so bad that I couldn’t sleep.
After a thorough examination (or at least as thorough as an eighty-year-old prep school doctor, who probably had limited employment prospects otherwise, could muster), he gave me a diagnosis. He said, quite plainly, that I had fourteen-year-old ligaments and tendons and was carrying the weight of a twenty-year old. He told me I had no choice but to stop playing tennis and that the night pain would gradually go away. I stopped playing tennis and the pain stopped. Easy fix. Instead, I became the JV Baseball manager and had a great experience learning how to be of service to people with little or no glory attached. What I also learned was that my body was not invincible to my size.
In college I got recruited to join the football team, but memories of my tentative joints, ligaments and tendons caused me to have the good sense to decline the offer to wrack myself up playing Ivy League football. While fulfilling the obligatory physical education requirements, I was stopped dead during a volleyball game in the massive Cornell gym called Barton Hall. I had jumped too hard and come down on a stanchion such that I ripped my Achilles Tendon. I spent several months hobbling around after that searing pain sent shock waves up my right leg. There was nothing to be done since it was not severed. They say tendons do not heal themselves, but my experience, strangely enough, is that they always do. To this day I have a small knob on my right Achilles Tendon where the unhealable tendon healed itself and scarred over. I had a similar event a few years later with a Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) in my left knee. It was declared irreparable and again unhealable by a Canadian orthopedist, only to have it heal itself with scar tissue that shows up on MRI’s as proof of the medical marvel that are my ligaments.
But back to my foot problem in middle suburban life. Something caused my feet to hurt in a rather unspecified way. So, I got it in my head to go to a podiatrist. I am sure that there are legitimate podiatrists, but I managed to find one that was a true fraud. Before he would even see me he had ordered up a raft of blood and urine tests. I played along as most of us do when it comes to what we consider authority figures. I did ask why the blood test (I knew enough about gout and uric acid to not bother asking about the urine test). The flippant answer I got from this quack was that he rarely saw a pair of feet walk in by themselves so he liked to understand the whole body. I was pretty sure he was just padding his bill, but I let him examine my feet anyway. I got lots of oohs and aahs and even a few tsk-tsks. He then gave me his diagnosis. He felt I had a congenital deformity of my feet. I didn’t want to tell him that my sister had always accused me of having “weird baby feet”, so I was anxious for the solution. He told me that he could fix me up with about a dozen in-office surgery procedures. First he would break all of my metatarsals to let them “float” down to where they should be. Then he would cut my metatarsal ligaments to lengthen them through some sort of splicing procedure. He felt that would loosen my hammer toes to flatten out. If that didn’t work, he might have to break several of my toes at a time to achieve the same outcome of flattening them out. I thanked the man, paid his bill (including the blood tests which were never documented to my knowledge), left his office and never looked back.
Over the years, including many years of hard skiing 30-40 days a year and even some years of slow jogging, I beat up my deformed feet over and over again. I occasionally bought orthopedic insoles, but I never really had further trouble with my feet. And then, a few years ago, I started getting a numbness in my toes. I have no signs of diabetes and a neurological and neuropathy exam informed me that I had unspecified and probably unhealable toe numbness. I have dealt with it like I did with my other foot and ligament ailments, by ignoring it and thanking my creator that he gave me joints and ligaments that manage to adequately support my bulk. And then, for some reason I got a pain in my left foot on the same day that Kim had a good visit with a local podiatrist who handled her ingrown toenails. She booked an appointment for me.
So, this week I went to a podiatrist for the first time in thirty years. I went expecting another elaborate diagnosis, but was disappointed. She examined my feet (no blood tests), watched me walk down and back the hallway, and declared my feet to be in fine shape and in no need of podiatry help. What? What kind of a podiatrist doesn’t invent foot problems? Well, it now seems that long after I have played a lifetime of tennis, skied a lifetime of slopes and walked there and back and up and down my little hillside estate, I have perfectly adequate feet. I’m sure I have some fundamental flaw to qualify for feet of clay, but for now my feet are fine.