As I grew, my left foot gradually grew more and more deformed. The doctors refused to do surgery on it because I was still growing, and the surgery would be worthless after a few months. As I got older, I could barely walk because my foot was so deformed. The kids in school teased me mercilessly. Sixth grade was so hellish for me I begged to stay home from school.

Finally, when I was 12 years old, my wish was granted- I went in for the first of the many foot reconstructions that were to come and did two years of home school. My foot was much better than before, I could walk on it, I could stand, and I didn't drag it, but it was nowhere near perfect.

Two years later I returned to school, but this time my parents decided to send me to a private school, in hopes that the people there would be kinder. They were generally more polite, but I was still very much the outcast. And after a while I got so used to it that I pushed myself all the way to the outside; I became a little goth girl in 1988, when it was still a very creative and insane way to look. Now it's in style, but back then it had bad connotations. But it helped me so much. It helped me pretend that the reason why people stared at me was not because I limped, but because I wore black tights in the middle of summer and had my hair dyed 40 different colors. It drew attention away from my twisted foot, and my strange gate.

Within a year I had to go back in for yet another surgery, and the pattern continued until I graduated high school in 1992 (on time, I might add, with high honors and a scholarship to Emory University waiting for me). I had quite a few operations during my high school years (averaging one to two a year), the most notable being a complicated skin graft on my right foot (the one my family calls the "good" foot) on a cut that would not heal after a few years. I had to stay in bed for six months so that the skin graft would heal, and the week I got up and started to walk again it just broke back open. Senior year came, and despite all the reconstructions, the bones on my foot were on the verge of collapse, and the cut on my right foot was only getting deeper. Thing were not good, but I was so tired of it at that point that I wasn't about to go in for more useless surgery. I was constantly being made promises that never saw the light of day. I had been through all these operations, one after the other, only to have everything fail. Each was supposed to correct the mistakes the last surgery left me with. I couldn't deal with it anymore.

 

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