The Change: 13

 What's Wrong With Me?

 (This is an ongoing story. If you want to start at the beginning, click here.)

This morning, I did 45 minutes of demanding vinyasa yoga. Last night I had to use a cane to get from the bedroom to the bathroom. That’s how changeable my foot is. 

Actually, it’s even more changeable than that. The other night I went out to dinner in the city, limping the three blocks from the parking garage to the restaurant and, two hours later, was able to walk back to the car pain-free.

Not that it really matters, but I’m going to explain what’s wrong with me now because I have a feeling that future posts will be easier to understand if I do.

My feet pronate, which means I walk very flat-footed, with my weight on the insides of my soles.  My right foot is so severely pronated that, when I first came to AE, I was practically walking on the inner SIDE of my foot.  AE uses lots of technical, bone terms to describe it but in laymen’s terms, my foot bone didn’t sit directly under my leg bone.  It’s like my whole foot had shifted out of position.

The first day I saw her, AE said my knee problems were related to this “collapsed” foot.  (I remembered what Jillian had said about my knee pain being foot related, so I kept an open mind.) I thought AE was going to tell me to get orthotics, as many chiropractors and podiatrists have suggested in my past. In fact, I have orthotics, but I haven’t worn them in years.

“You’re not going to be able to fix anything in your body until you get that foot fixed,” she said.

I was waiting. Surgery? Orthotics? She wasn’t offering up any suggestions and I was confused.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Well, we have to get that talus bone back on the calcaneus,” she said. I nodded like I knew what she was talking about.

“Is that something you can do?” I asked, half expecting her to laugh at me.

“Oh, sure,” she said. I’m not sure why I was so surprised by this answer. Reconnecting my talus bone and my calcaneus certainly technically fell into her reported purview (“she can fix anything except broken bones and death,” they’d said). But it seemed too easy – especially for the way my life goes.  “Here’s what’s wrong with you and I can fix it.”  Few people have ever said that to me, and if they have, for the most part, they’ve been wrong.

NEXT