The Man Who Was Born With His Feet On Backwards

You probably know by now that I’m all about helping people relieve chronic pain and live longer and healthier lives. Just the other day, a gentleman visited me at the clinic to request medical marijuana. He said his feet had rotated 180 degrees from normal when he was born. He was literally born with his feet on backwards.

He was a young black man who looked much younger than the 47 he told me was his age. He said orthopedic surgeons had started working on him before he could remember. He’d had a total of 34 operations, with the most recent at age 18. To me, his gait looked amazingly normal. “I bet you want to see my feet,” he said as he ripped off his shoes and socks. He had one eight inch well-heeled vertical scar on the posterior aspect of each of his very thin ankles, and a transverse scar of about the same length on the outside of each foot. The left one was a bit more deformed than the right, mostly because it contained a titanium plate which he said he would have to keep for life. He said he got into trouble in the Army, so all he had to live on was social security disability. But, he told me he had served honorably in Iraq. I tried to get this story from him; it was neither simple nor easily believable. With jobs hard to come by, he had simply enlisted in the Army, as had many of his friends. He just didn’t bother telling anybody that he had been born with his feet on backwards. He said the standard Army physical wasn’t much. His operative wounds were a little fresher then. He didn’t say anything about his ankles, and nobody noticed. In my office, he had a pretty standard looking gait. He said he had bought himself a new pair of habitually oversized tennis shoes. He said his feet were usually pain free for a few days with new shoes. He had planned his trip to see me within a day or two after he did this.

His military occupational specialty was an 11Bravo, which means “light infantry.” He said that perhaps he’s had a stroke of luck that it was light and not heavy infantry. It took longer for anyone to notice that he walked poorly and never completed most of the marching type assignments because he was in pain. It was apparently a year and a half or so — and a lot of sore feet — later when somebody noticed. The military charged him with having misrepresented himself at his induction. He was separated from the Army with a less-than-honorable discharge, thus he is ineligible for VA type medical care or any kind of compensation. He hurts a lot more now than a few years ago when he was in the Army. He is now living on social security disability of the secular or civilian kind. The military is not going to give him anything because, well, he “misrepresented himself.” Actually, in order to give him any kind of a military pension he would have to have his discharge changed to honorable. I know for a fact that veteran service organizations will often help with this.

He said he tried this before and is not going to try again. He has been told and knows perfectly well that the Army is not going to admit they “missed” his deformed skinny ankles in an induction physical. I encouraged him to keep trying and even told him to get in touch with the Jewish War Veterans online. When I was working with them as Co-Surgeon General in Boston many years ago, most of the soldiers who used them to get redress were not even Jewish. I think they just liked the go-for-the-jugular Jewish lawyers. Usually, when I tell a veteran to “never give up/never surrender” I am talking about their fight against the bureaucracy. In this case, I meant the pain. Of course, I gave him his marijuana permission. He mostly uses the marijuana to rub on his feet. He promised me also that he would “never give up/never surrender” in the fight against pain. I won’t either.