Living with brachymetatarsia

Hey everyone,

I decided because I have so much time on my hands, that I should write a blog to help those who are struggling with Brachymetatarsia. I found with my research, that there wasn't that many entries out there telling people what it is like to live with it, and what the surgery is like.


For the past nine years I have had to deal with a deformity called Brachymetatarsia. For those of you that don't know, it is a condition where a metatarsal bone doesn't develop in (most commonly) the 4th toe, making it shorter than the 5th. This deformity is fairly uncommon, and correcting it is a difficult process. People with this deformity generally develop psychological problems, as it begins to become noticeable around the age of 8-9, when kids have a tendency to tease those who are different. Because of this, we force ourselves to hide our feet, restructuring our personalities to become someone we are not.

This is my story...

I was happy as a kid, always outdoors swimming, I loved swimming, and my feet were the last thing I cared about. One day someone else pointed out that my feet looked weird and started talking about it behind my back. I became self-concious and developed anxiety, refusing to enter any activity that would reveal my feet. This consisted of lies upon lies and eventually the reoccurrence of reasons why I couldn’t come over, or go swimming, lead to my friends giving up on me, moving on and finding new people to spend their time with. I did little to prevent this isolation, I only saw it as preserving what was left of my inner strength, rather than an opportunity to share my insecurities and move on. 

I didn't allow myself to wear nice clothes, creating a false image of who I was, because the only shoes I would allow myself to wear were converse or closed toe, which had to cover a specific amount of my foot. Summer was hell but winters made me feel more comfortable and I would start acting more myself around others.

My parents took me to see numerous doctors, all refusing to perform any form of "cosmetic surgery", they said that my feet weren't doing any harm so they wouldn't touch it, however, the psychological pain was horrific. We had found doctors in America that performed the surgery, but the duration of recovery was too much to consider getting it done. I had lost hope and my depression became worse. Then one day my mum found a surgeon in Sydney, that did this surgery, we arranged an appointment and I am currently on my recovery for my second foot, and would like to share my experience with people struggling to deal with this just like me.

I would like everyone to know that I didn't get this operation done just because of how my feet looked. I experienced an immense amount of pain from just walking, and found almost every shoe uncomfortable. I would get blisters on top of blisters and shooting pains in my feet. This became unbearable because I loved to exercise and couldn't because of the pain.

I have attached some images of my feet before the operation.
 The top view shows the odd appearance.

  

The side view shows how the toe is pushed above the others, this makes it prone to blisters which hurt sooo much. I also noticed that after any form of exercise I felt pain in my foot, because my toe would be pushed up so much all the muscles and bones readjusted.

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