Shoes After Frame

It took around two weeks in early January to make the many minute strut adjustments to the frame, adjustments which corrected my lower right leg by eleven degrees. Coincidentally—and tangentially–it also took me two weeks to write this blog entry, which I started composing more than a week ago and have simply let sit. Today's post is about the consequences of those adjustments.

A good number of the consequences of the adjustments were consequences we'd planned on with the procedure. The surgeon stopped making comments about how the weight-bearing axis in my leg was off, the x-rays showed that my leg was in good shape heading forward, I was granted permission to run… I'm sure there are more (and I'm sure I'll keep encountering more and more as I continue to move away from the frame), but I can't think of any at the moment.

And then there are the secondary consequences, the consequences we kind of knew were coming when the frame was bolted into place but didn't necessarily dwell on. For instance, the swelling my leg is currently experiencing or the battle scars I've been proudly showing off everywhere I go. But the main secondary consequence I'm going to mention today is shoe fit.

But first, a quick explanation of my shoe-buying habits.

For a while, we got my shoes at whatever the cheap and convenient shoe store was: park in a giant parking lot, head down aisles of shoes, judging them mostly based on style and price, figuring out fit based on "does my foot fit in this?" without help from store staff. This pattern continued until my orthopedic surgeon in Virginia recommended we go to the running store in town.

From what I remember (which is, to be fair, not as much as it possibly could be), I went through multiple pairs of shoes before being paired with The Beast, an ultra-supportive model which I stuck with for years. The Beast was made even more supportive with the addition of an insole which was then built up to work with my rather unique, bone growth-altered gait. The shoes worked just fine. Every so often, I'd wear through a pair and we'd just replace The Beast with another set in different colors. It got to the point that in summer 2012, we bought three pairs of The Beast with the intention that I'd just switch out pair after pair (the hope was that the shoes would last about a school year).

The first pair survived just fine from summer 2012 until December 2012, when the frame was placed on my leg. And, since I couldn't exactly walk around too much with two and a half pounds of metal skewering my tibia and fibula, the shoes hung in there and hung in there. They made it through spring track season, they made it beyond when the frame was removed in May, they made it until I got permission to take off my full-leg splint in June. And then they were switched out.

The second of the three pairs lived from June to last Tuesday (October 8). In the beginning, their life was fairly quiet. I wore the shoes when I went for bike rides or to accompany my mother to the grocery store. When just hanging around the house, I went either barefoot or in socks.

Then I came to the University of Virginia.

My dorm, Balz-Dobie, is not what you'd call ideally located. It is situated a solid 0.6 miles from my nearest class. The library is 0.8 miles away. I budget at least 15 minutes every time I want to walk to the main part of grounds.

And of course, before too long, my shoes looked like this:

It was time to admit that, perhaps, I needed to have my feet fit, taking into account that a number of things had changed since the last time I went home with multiple pairs of The Beast.

I entered the running store and asked to be fit from scratch. Two employees and half a dozen (if not more) pairs of shoes later, the Beast was gone, replaced with a less supportive but more cushioned pair. Rather than looking as if they had just taken a mud bath, my feet looked like they had stolen the coloring from a mallard duck. Behold:

And how do the shoes work? Pretty well, it seems. There was some minor blistering early on, but that has died down completely. I'm enjoying the cushioning (and the coloring). My walks to and from class feel just fine. But perhaps more noteworthy, the evening after I got the shoes, I went for another run, my second that week.

Sunday, two days previous, I ran my first mile since eighth grade.

And on Tuesday, October 8, I broke my personal record for longest (continuous) distance run, a relatively slow and leisurely trip which snaked from my dorm through several streets behind the University before depositing me in central grounds. Depending on Google Maps' mood when I ask for the distance, it was either 1.7 or 1.8 miles. Perhaps not a huge leap over my old high of 1.5 miles (accomplished on a sunny day in eighth grade with six laps around a local high school track), and perhaps describing that run as "continuous" doesn't take into account the silent paused moments of jogging in place while I waited for the crosswalk signal to turn to WALK, but still…progress.

Progress.

A quick note on upcoming entries: I promise I'd been intending to post this a long time ago, but… Well, it's online now. Hopefully in the future I'm a bit more timely with when I upload these things to the Internet. We'll see. My fingers are crossed.

Four Months Later (Give or Take)

As in introductory note: this blog is designed to serve as the sequel to my earlier blog, Leg Plus Frame, which recounts the time where my leg got very close and personal with an almost-attractive (actually somewhat repulsive) device called a Taylor Spatial Frame. Just for context.

From what I understand, I wasn't born with crooked legs. But I have a bone condition which results in my bones generating a plethora of outcroppings and some of those outcroppings interfered with my growth plates and before too long, I had crooked legs. And this isn't to say that my legs weren't the only parts of my body affected—they weren't—but my legs were operated on the most and have caused the most personal drama, so I'm going to be focusing on the legs.

My mother says that when I was younger, I was incredibly active and in shape. At some point, that slowed down. When it came time to run the mile with my second grade class, I came in dead last with a downright pathetic 18:45. Things went up from there—I shaved five minutes off the mile time the next year—but I was always one of the slowest and that always bothered me. My overarching goal became to run a mile in less than ten minutes.

Starting in third grade, I began to have surgeries. Much of the surgeries focused on fixing my legs, on coaxing them back into some semblance of normalcy, on making sure that they would be straight so they would be functional and remain functional for a decent span of time. Some of the surgeries were on my shoulders. Some were on my hands. I had a bone growth removed from a rib.

In eighth grade, during a lull between operations, I ran my mile in less than ten minutes. The time was 9:19. A few weeks later, I ran a mile and a half. To date, that is the farthest I have ever run.

But the main thing to discuss here in the introductory post to this blog about my life after a Taylor Spatial Frame and my recovering from such a device is the Taylor Spatial Frame.

When I was in ninth grade, my family moved from Charlottesville, Virginia to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Given that we were now a thousand miles (or however far it is) away from my previous orthopedic surgeon, I got an appointment with a new surgeon. He x-rayed my legs, drew lines over the x-rays and told us that my right leg was crooked. I ran the risk of developing arthritis early. He said that the way to fix this was to put an external fixator, a metal frame, on my leg, metal pins running through the skin and into the bone, and slowly adjust everything into place.

I refused. For years, I refused. I'd read about external fixators in Stephen King's On Writing and even though The Shining had scenes which scared me and It and 'Salem's Lot (and, just recently, Doctor Sleep), out of all the Stephen King I've read the passage which had the greatest effect on me was the bit about external fixators. I still remember the first time I read that passage and the first thought which popped into my head was, Never never never never.

Eventually I saw the logic and reason behind the surgeon's proposed surgery.

On the morning of December 26, 2013, I was wheeled into the operating room and the frame was placed on my leg. A wedge of my right tibia was removed and my right fibula was sawn in half.

I spent the next five months wandering around with five 6 millimeter pins and 2 piano wire pins holding two and a half pounds of metal frame to my bone. In mid-January, following weeks of strut adjustments, my leg was officially straightened. By late January and early February, I was bearing weight.

On May 3, 2013, the day of the final snow in an unbelievably lengthy Minnesota winter, the frame was removed and I was switched into a full-leg splint.

In early June, the splint went away.

In late June, I was given explicit permission to run for the first time in years.

* * *

So here we are. My leg has been freed from the frame for five months and free from its splint for four. I have been allowed to run for three months. But then again, there's a difference between can run and have run.

In some regards, life after the frame has actually been rather different than life before the frame. Before my experience with the frame, I was afraid to wear shorts and thereby show off my lower leg. Now I wear shorts without shame. Part of that may be how I'm currently attending college in central Virginia, where "fall" clearly means 80˚ temperatures. Part of that may be how a massive bone growth (which I referred to as my "second kneecap") was removed the day the frame put on. Part of that may be how after having a meal frame on your leg for five months you just don't care anymore. Part of that may be how I enjoy showing off my battle scars.

Because, yes, the frame left scars. They are an angry purple and are somewhat round. Whenever I'm asked about them, I'll tell people that they're from a Taylor Spatial Frame and before too long I'm trying to rush through the story of why I had a frame when I wasn't in a major accident in far too little time.

Scars aren't the only thing the frame left behind. My right leg remains very swollen. My right foot remains an unknown variable for shoe fitting.

But still…

When I wore the frame, I thought nothing at all about having the metal piercing my skin. I'd play with the scabs around the pin sites and hitch my sweatpants up to show the thing off to the world. It's now been long enough that I've gone from viewing the frame as somewhat normal to being barely able to believe that I actually thought that it was normal to have my leg transfixed with such metal. I'm walking around again (my dorm is more than half a mile from classes and I've chewed through a pair of shoes in about two months without running) and can barely remember the time not so long ago when I was stuck on the couch watching endless amounts of Netflix.

In other words, I'm pretty sure I'm still recovering.

Yes, the frame imparted unto me some scarring. And yes, the frame imparted unto me some swelling. But the other thing the frame imparted unto me was some unwanted weight. After all, I spent five months barely mobile.

During the summer, I biked all over the place. The Twin Cities have a fantastic variety of bike trails, many scenic, many well maintained. That helped.

Since arriving at college, I have been swimming four or five days a week. The pool's free for me to use with my student ID, so why not?

In the beginning, I would swim from one end to the other—a grand total of 25 yards—and rest for thirty seconds, a minute, before trudging back. But as time went on, my rests grew shorter and shorter until I decided to learn how to do flip turns. And once I learned how to flip turns, I progressed from being able to swim 250 yards in a go to swimming 1650 last Monday—a swimmer's mile. My stomach started shrinking, the flab started going away (but isn't all gone yet). My arms sprouted biceps, a fact which still amuses me and has provided much distraction.

But even though I was getting rid of the pounds the frame gave me, there was one thing I hadn't done. Yes, I was allowed to and yes, getting medical permission was one of the best moments of the past year, but still. I hadn't run.

I knew when I finished writing the last blog that I'd want to do a sequel blog about my time after the frame. And there were days when I thought I might want to start this blog—the day when I got permission to run, the day when I wore jeans to Chem lab and was utterly miserable because my swollen leg didn't really fit in the jeans—but I hadn't actually done anything yet.

Cue tonight.

For a variety of reasons, all of them related to my Chemistry class, I didn't have time this evening to make my customary appointment with the pool. So I ran. I didn't run far (1.1 miles, according to Google Maps), and I didn't run fast and I didn't run long, but still. I ran. I ran and my feet pounded the sidewalk and there was a certain musicality to their rhythm. I ran and in running I became one of those runners I see around grounds all the time. That was me. I didn't stop except to wait for the cars to go away so I could cross the street and I didn't resort to walking.

It was the first time I ran since the mile and a half in eighth grade. And it was the second longest run I have ever completed.

Was I nervous leading up to the run? I was incredibly nervous. I knew what I was about to do. I stalled. Of course I stalled. Walking out of my dorm, I saw a raccoon rummaging through the trash can. I followed the raccoon as it climbed up a tree, the tree's top swaying as the raccoon's mass climbed higher and higher up the tapering trunk. I walked a bit uphill, gave myself a bit of a downhill start.

And then I set off.

I passed the great brick-and-light monoliths of New Dorms, their seas of windows practically constellations. I passed the cafeteria I eat breakfast in every day and I crossed the not-inconsequential artery which is Alderman Road and I passed Gilmer Hall and the Chemistry Building and I ran down Engineering Way and I ran past the football stadium and I ran past the Aquatic and Fitness Center where I've spent so much time this semester and I ran all the way up to the door of my dorm and I ran.

Well, maybe it was more of a jog. But it sure wasn't a walk.

My core hurt and I had to keep thinking the whole time breathe in through your nose not your mouth but my legs hung in there okay.

And I ran the whole way.

So that's where we begin this story of leg after frame. Five months after the device's removal and about three hours after I actually managed to go for a run. My leg swollen (but decreasing in size), the scars still visible, still obvious. The Taylor Spatial Frame still gone and my legs still straight.