A few weeks ago I looked over the shoulder of the orthopaedic consultant and leaned forward to double-take the X-ray image of my leg on his screen. “Is that a break?” I asked timidly, “that gap?”
“Yes” he replied, “The graft you had as a child didn’t take”
I felt my face screw up … almost not wishing to ask the supplementary question … “Does … err … Does that mean … are you actually saying that ….” I didn’t know the appropriate tone. Smilingly mocking what might be my naïve misunderstanding … or genuine disbelief: “Has that leg been broken for … for FIFTY years”
In that matter-of-fact tone I’ve heard before from experts who think everyone has their level of understanding he pointed to the screen with his pen and said “Yes … look you can clearly see the 10 centimetre gap in the fibula”
He noticed my concerned face and added “The fibula is not weight bearing.”
Well that’s OK then.
I was born with what is prosaically called a club foot. In the late fifties/early sixties surgical techniques were clearly not very advanced. In my first few years of life I had multiple surgeries trying to realign the foot. Calipers, walking frame, plaster casts; I was pretty much the cripple that the term clubfoot might suggest. At age 10 the latest intervention was to graft bone from my hip to fix the “fibular non-union”. It was this that didn’t take and yet no-one told me.
My consultant was a Mr Payne.
The management of the problem after the graft was by built-up ‘surgical shoes’, another dreadful sixties term that reinforced the cripple tag. These were beautifully handmade by HW Poole & Sons of North Street, Leeds. They weighed approximately three quarters of a ton per shoe and by the time I reached my mid-teens I gave up on them. Embarrassed that they were so ugly and marked me out as different … the fear of all teenagers.
But because I couldn’t do sports and PE I was already different. Already the outsider and began to embrace the position. I became a joker, a mimic and a music expert. I remember as a second-former one of the ‘hard’ popular kids coming to me at morning break – not to steal my dinner money but to ask about a particular early seventies artiste and their new track. Yes I was quite the expert on Lobo and their track with a verse that went : “ .. Me and you and a dog named Boo …How I love being a free man” … but I digress.
Since then shoe-buying makes me feel physically ill. A visceral turning of the stomach even passing a Freeman Hardy & Willis shop. My feet were two sizes apart. My left leg at least an inch shorter than the right. I had to buy 2 pairs of shoes or switch barcodes in M&S to make my own perfect pair.
In recent years though the pain has outdone the vanity: today an hour long walk on the beach means a day of rest. So that’s why I was seeing an orthopedic surgeon. I actually was seen by three lower-limb-specialist consultants who, over the course of a year, decided on the best way forward. The problem is not so much the non-union of the fibula or BROKEN LEG as I prefer to call it, but the mal-alignment of the ankle which sits at an angle of 50 degrees as opposed to the ZERO degrees it should sit at!
Anyways almost a year on and indeed in the week of the 70th anniversary of the NHS and I received a letter from the consultant (the third one) confirming that he will operate to straighten the leg.
The procedure involves cutting the tibia just above the ankle twisting it a bit and adding a series of external fixations like a mecanno set which will, over a period of about 6 months, be constantly adjusted to stimulate regrowth of the bone and correct the 50 degree mal-alignment of the ankle.
Yes it’s going to hurt. And be inconvenient. And I hope it’ll be worth it.
The surgery is today. Follow my progress at mywickedankle.co.uk Wish me luck.