My Recovery from a Foot Drop

When I Woke Up

I woke up shivering. I looked up and my parents, along with the doctor and a few nurses, were hovering over me. I heard the beep, beep of the heart monitor. I didn’t know what hit me. It seemed as though just a few moments ago, the nurse told me to count backwards from ten as she injected the poisonous mixture that would put me to sleep. But I was so cold now–so very very cold. The recovery room nurse saw my shivers and brought me a heated blanket. Ah! I suddenly felt as if someone had placed me in a pile of warm towels, fresh from the dryer. Now, that felt good.

But why were my parents staring at my foot? I hadn’t gotten surgery on my foot. It was supposed to be a simple surgery: remove the baker’s cyst that had formed behind my knee. The surgery was SUPPOSED to be simple.

A Month Before the Surgery

As I conditioned for junior high basketball in August, I was on top of my game–I had improved my basketball skills during the previous spring, and I was really excited to see what I could do on the court. Then one night, everything changed. While watching the wheel of fortune with my mom and great-aunt one night, I felt a sharp stab of pain behind my right knee….and then I felt IT–a hardened mass that scared the living daylights out of me. Was it cancer? What the heck was it? The next day, tests showed it was a baker’s cyst–ONLY a baker’s cyst.

And then I had surgery that September. It was SUPPOSED to be simple.

Back in the Recovery Room . . . My Floppy Foot

As I gradually became more aware of my surroundings, I watched the doctor as he prodded my foot. Why were they so concerned about my foot?

The nurses eventually wheeled me out of the recovery room and placed me in the short-stay unit. I was sick as a dog from the anesthetic. And once the nausea passed after a few hours of sipping ginger ale, I began to fall in and out of sleep. I kept wondering why the doctors were keeping me in the hospital so long. All of the other patients who had surgery that day had left.

I began to realize that something was wrong with my foot.

By five o’clock that evening (I had gotten there 12 hours before that), an aid finally came to my bed to wheel me out of the hospital to go home. I was in a full leg brace to keep my knee from moving, and when she swung my leg around to help me off of the bed, my foot bent backwards in an unnatural position. I felt nothing from my foot, but I had seen something frightening: it just looked like a dead fish, flopping back and forth.

The Full-Leg Cast

The next day, I went to the doctor’s office. What he had hoped to be a temporary loss of feeling below my knee turned out to be something more serious. The main nerve had been damaged; I now had a foot drop. The only thing I could do was move my foot from side to side. Other than that, it just hung limp. For some reason, the doctor slapped a full-leg cast on my leg, keeping my foot perpendicular to the leg so that it wouldn’t hang down during the recovery of my knee.

In the ensuing six weeks, my purple cast was signed by friends and family, all of whom pushed me around in a wheel chair for two of those weeks. My friends were not inconvenienced, though–they enjoyed leaving class five minutes early so that we could take the elevator to the second level of the school. Apparently, my full-leg cast was a great way to befriend eighth graders who wanted to leave class early! I was too young and naive to realize what was really going on with my leg. I never thought of the possibility that I wouldn’t walk normally again….but my family had, although they kept it a secret from me.

After seven weeks, the cast came off and gravity got the better of my foot–it immediately hung down limp while I still lay on the examining table.

Physical Therapy: Months Instead of Weeks

The day after my cast was removed, I began physical therapy for my leg. When I hobbled into Norman’s office (Norman being my physical therapist), I didn’t know that he had made the deduction that I wouldn’t walk normally again. When I was about five months into PT, Norman did tell my mother about his pessimistic thoughts on that first day. To put it simply, he thought I would never walk without some kind of support again.

After that first meeting, I spent every day at physical therapy and began a 7-month stint with Norman. Five days a week, three hours a day after school, I worked the hardest I had ever worked. The physical demands on my leg were exhausting–but I continued. The only alternative was to stop and never have the hope of playing ball again.

In addition to physical therapy, I had to wake up early for school so that I could do extra stretches for my ankle. I had to use a large, rubber band to move my foot up and down; it was the only way I could pull my foot up. I also had to attach small electric nodes to my leg to stimulate the nerve. I can still feel the pain. I had to do that before I went to bed, too.

Ten Percent Still Left!

In the first couple of weeks after my cast was removed, I went to a neurologist to see how much of the nerve in my leg had been damaged by the surgery. After sticking needles in my leg and jolting it with electric current, the doctor concluded that I only had ten percent of my main nerve in the lower right leg. Ninety percent of it was gone–NINETY percent–but the remaining ten percent was just enough to allow the nerve to regenerate. Ten percent the wrong way and–well, then I wouldn’t have recovered any of the nerve. I would have been crippled for the rest of my life. Thank God for ten percent!

In my youth, I hardly noticed the psychological issues that could have accompanied my wearing a custom-made leg brace so that I could limp around school. What was it to my young mind? Wearing made since–I mean, the brace was the only way I could hold my foot up. It was the only thing that allowed me to slowly stop using crutches. Wearing that brace just became a normal thing for me.

I never gave my ability to recover a second thought–for an important reason: I wanted to play slow-pitch softball in the spring–and I had six months to do something about it once I got the cast off of my leg. After one month, I began to walk without crutches–although I wouldn’t exactly call it walking. It was more like a gimpy limp–dragging my right foot behind me. My older sister, a senior in high school, would see me in the halls and playfully call me “gimp” as I hobbled past. I think it was her way of dealing with what happened to me–she made light of it to help me. In many ways, her making light of it did keep me from realizing just how awful my future would be if I didn’t keep working hard with Norman.

I Did Not Quit

I wish that I could share, in detail, the very long recovery process–just to make readers understand what recovering from a foot drop was like. Every little victory was a moment to celebrate: the first time I walked without crutches, the moment I didn’t need my leg brace, the day I could participate in gym class, the first time I picked up a softball bat again.

On the first day that my physical therapist met me, he believed that I would never walk normally again, let alone run. But then there was that ten percent. And then there was my youth, tenacity, and athleticism. After five months of hard work (and maybe a little pain), I was walking somewhat normally. In fact, I started jogging around that time (even though I limped a little when my foot got tired). All of the weightlifting I was doing at physical therapy actually made me stronger than I had been before the surgery.

I think around the time I started jogging in high-top sneakers (so my ankle would be supported), my family and Norman breathed a little easier. I really didn’t think about it too much, though–I was too busy moving around without my brace.

The one thing I would never have again, though, would be long-distance stamina (when I attempted to run cross country years later, I was horrible at it). But I could sprint, and I could play the sports that I loved–softball and basketball. When softball started in April, I was back on the field. And by July, I was lifting weights to condition for junior varsity basketball the following winter.

I was back. And more determined to never quit at the one thing I loved the most: basketball. Even though I had to start from scratch to regain the momentum I had in basketball before I discovered the cyst, I played four years of basketball. Sometimes, when team politics and the like got in the way of my goals, I really did want to quit. That was especially true in my senior year of ball.

But I didn’t quit. I kept going, even when I didn’t see much playing time during my senior year. I kept going–because I had worked too hard for the privilege of just walking. I had worked too hard for the privilege of playing the game that I loved.

Looking Back

Seventeen years ago, my foot drop was a horrendous complication from a simple surgery. The event was something that changed me at a young age. On the positive side, the whole affair gave me depth, determination, and heart. On the negative side, however, I experience a little panic whenever a body part like a hand or foot goes numb. I know that it’s just fatigue or a pinched nerve, but the numbness just freaks me out–it reminds me too much of a complication that I try to forget.

And yet I can never forget about it. The foot drop was a defining moment in my life.

Ten percent more–and I would have been a cripple for the rest of my life. Ten percent more, and I never would have been able to run, shoot hoops, lift weights, dance at clubs and parties, swim, or ski. My life would have been so much different. But it was that ten percent–that little twist of fate–that allowed me to walk, to run, to play the game that I loved the most–basketball.

I have been dancing through life ever since.