My name is François-Xavier, I’m 29 years old and live in Bordeaux, France. I swim, cycle and run.
I was born with bi-lateral clubfeet. It’s a malformation of the foot, ankle and calf, there is multiple form of severity, however most of the time you have :
- your feet poiting 180 degrees behind
- very low mobility of the ankles
- very low muscular developement of the scalps
A picture’s worth a thousands words, here’s me, a few years ago … 🙂
I was surgically operated three times, the first one I was almost one year old, the second one I was 4, the last one I was 13, and only the right foot was operated this time.
Why I decided to create this blog
Growing with this disease is neither hard or easy. If you’re treated and followed by medical staff early on, you’ll be able to walk, jump and run, almost like any other kids. You’ll not be the fastest, but you’ll be able to play with others. There are diseases way more disabling than this one.
However, growing up with clubfoot is not easy. Up until my 17 years old, I needed to see a physical therapist once in a week. When I was even younger, it was 2 or 3 times a week. I had to sleep with plates, to help correct my feet, and put on ugly shoes, specifically designed to be ugly but also to prevent my feet of going back inwards.
I see this disease with 2 aspects :
- The mechanical one : how the foot moves, how strong you’re on your feet, how much stability you have, etc.
- The aesthetic one : how your foot and scalfs looks compared to other ones.
Both of this aspects impact your life and depending of the individual, one might be worse than the other. However, how different you feel compared to others, is also heavily impacted by your mental perception of yourself. That can be worked out separately.
I still didnt explained why I created this blog, but it’s not to attract compassion about my condition. I recently searched online people with the same limits as me, and how they managed it. Because once you’re adult, you no longer follow medical treatments, but you still have some issues. I’ve stumbled upon this subreddit and also Tony Spineto’s blog.
Finding Tony’s blog for me was a great shock. I have no memories of meeting another person with the same problems as me, even though it’s not a very rare one. So finding out someone else with clubfeet and was doing Ironmans was huge, it gave me hope. His blog is a gold mine of informations, and very inspiring. However it was a little rusty and it seems Tony is no longer active online. Some comments were left without answers, so it gave me the idea to write about my own story, and I hope, help other people that have something to do with this condition, to gather infos.
fxturbo was the nickname my physical therapists gave me when I was young.