Are Your Feet Trying To Kill You?

My feet were out to get me. Here’s how I survived.

My feet were out to get me.

The toe-curling cramps that yanked me from sleep in the middle of the night. One time, I screamed so loud my neighbors called the police.

The way they went pins and needles for the first mile of a pre-dawn winter run. I stamped down the black, icy road, as if running on stilts. And how later in the shower, they stung and turned waxen, like corpse feet. Memento mori. Yes, they were out to get me.

Five years ago, they flew out from under me as I stepped onto a slick metal plate embedded in the cobblestone at an outdoor farmer’s market in rural South France. Before I had my wind back, passers-by had yanked me upright, speaking to one another in rapid French. I teetered on my left leg for forty minutes until the ambulance arrived. Someone handed me my phone, which had skittered away when I fell. Thank God it wasn’t broken—there were probably no Apple Stores in rural South France.

What had actually broken was my hip.

Most of my life my feet were two blocks of clay. I stuffed them into hiking boots and Nikes, clomped around in clogs, and when I needed to, I tortured them at toe-point with beautiful high-heeled dress shoes.

Decades of too-small footwear and elevated heels made my feet truculent and crabbed. Their revenge was sneaky and masterfully disguised: sore hips, sore back, weak hamstrings, throbbing quads, iffy balance. That rouge pain in my right butt when I pressed on the gas pedal.

My feet looked innocent, all weak and pale, but, man, they were killers. They were going to take me down.

Have you ever been to a podiatrist office? My first time, in my thirties, I thought I had stress fractures in both feet, it hurt so much to walk. Everyone else in the waiting room was very old, wearing very ugly shoes. I saw truths I was not meant to see so young. I saw gnarled, overlapping toes with opaque toenails straining through the gaps in orthopedic sandals. Everyone was complaining to their neighbor. Their feet were killing them.

The podiatrist told me my problem was cheap shoes. It’s true my shoes were cheap; I’d bought them at Marshalls. I should throw them away, he said, and buy shoes with strong arch support. He recommended the orthopedic shoe shop he owned in the suburbs, where all his clients bought their shoes. He handed me a flyer. No, thank you! I scurried away in my bad Marshalls shoes with my vanity intact.

Another time, I went to see him because I thought I had a microscopic shard of glass stuck between two toes. It is a “corn,” he told me. The podiatrist had a Russian accent, so I assumed I had misheard him. It was as if he’d said, “It is an eggplant.” Later, I found out the term is from the Latin “cornus”, meaning horn. Not that “horn” makes more sense, but that’s what it’s called. I know now that a corn is a tiny callus formed by suboptimal gait patterns and ill-fitting footwear. The podiatrist mentioned nothing about my gait, probably because I was seated on the exam chair for the entire time he was in the room. He spent thirty seconds digging out the “corn” and suggested I make an appointment for him to surgically break my toes and reset them so this terrible corn situation would not recur. I scurried away, no follow up appointment necessary!

As a kid, I was the tenderest tenderfoot. I grew up in the city, and though we had a backyard to play in, I always wore sneakers, knockoff Keds. No grass between the toes for me, gross. You could step on a worm. On the rare occasions we visited friends at their suburban pools or went to the beach, I would keep my shoes on while the other kids horsed around barefoot on the rough concrete and burning sand. I couldn’t understand how they did that. It was as if they could walk on fire.

During the school year, for all twelve years, my stiff uniform oxfords blistered my heels and rubbed the skin from my poor triangle pinkie toes. We bought them a half-size big in August, and by April, they were a half-size small. The August before I turned ten, my mother took us to the uniform store for that year’s mandated saddle shoes. I still remember my gush of shame when the salesman curled his lip and made a big loud example of me in front of the whole store. “You kids, you run around barefoot all summer, and your feet just spread and spread and get so big.” Baby’s first body-shaming.

For a long time after that it seemed to me that smaller feet were the way to go, and if you couldn’t have small feet, at least you could fake it with small shoes.

Just out of college, I spent a whole paycheck on a pair of splendid, too-small Frye boots. They were size 7.5 (last pair in stock, end of season, no returns!), and I am a legit 9. This time, the salesman flattered me. He tested my big toe with his thumb and said they were perfect because “good leather stretches, anyway.” I wore them the first and only time for a seventeen-hour day—to the office, out to miserable dinner, and an agonizing walk to and from the train. I still remember most of the dinner conversation, about a boring-sounding movie, My Dinner With Andre, which I had not seen, but my dinner date talked about for two hours. Somehow, the pain in my feet seared all that into my brain. The worst, the most exquisite, was when I finally arrived home and had to slowly pull them off. My liquid blisters were the size of sand dollars and kept me on the edge of tears for weeks.

The French word for hip is hanche—like a cow! After my feet (pieds) betrayed me in France, I had to pantomime with the French paramedics, qu'est-ce que c'est?, to find that out. I was taken to a quaint village hospital that reminded me a lot of my girlhood Catholic school, right down to the saint statue in the hallway. The village was so remote that even the surgeon did not speak English. At home in the US, my daughters googled my problem and wept because up to twenty-five percent of patients with hip fractures die within a year¹. The numbers used to be even worse. Before hip-pinning surgery was invented around mid-century, I would most certainly have been bedridden for the rest of my short life². (Told you they were out to kill me.)

Sometimes, the most disarming thing you can do to an enemy is to turn around and embrace them. Last week, someone I barely know began attacking me verbally, aggressively, unfairly. In a moment of genius or idiocy, I took a risk and said, “I think you need a hug—is it okay if I hug you?”

Sometimes, the most disarming thing you can do to an enemy is to turn around and embrace them. Last week, when someone I barely know began attacking me verbally, aggressively, unfairly, I experienced a moment of genius or idiocy. I took a risk and said, “I think you need a hug—is it okay if I hug you?” And do you know what, she really did need the hug.

That’s what I did to my feet. I disarmed them with love.

It was winter, and back home the floors in my house were cold. In normal times, being a lifelong tenderfoot, I’d have been all socked-and-slippered up. But in the weeks following the hip-pinning, I was too debilitated to put them on myself, and it was exhausting to beg for help, so I got used to being barefoot.

Did you know there are more than 200,000 nerve endings in each of your feet? Or that there are 52 bones in each foot—a quarter of the bones in your body—and that your feet directly affect your pelvic floor, deep core, and diaphragm?

If you treat your feet like two blocks of clay, if you numb them off from your brain (200,000 nerve endings!), if you cram them into pointy shoes, and crush them like a pack of cigarettes against your body’s weight for the vanity of high heeled shoes (26 bones in each foot!)— well, they will surely try to kill you. Can you even blame them?

I did my hip rehab via Zoom during quarantine— barefoot because by then, I was always barefoot. I worked out barefoot, lifted weights barefoot, walked outside to the compost bins barefoot over the frozen garden path. A shiver, a thrill, a frisson. That’s what it is to feel alive. That spring, for the first time in my life, I stepped barefoot in the grass, and my feet delighted in the textures of the earth. Prickleballs. Stones. Twigs. The spongey grass. I had landed on a new planet. My high arches, which I used to cosset with “supportive” shoes and insoles, grew strong in their own right.

If you want to keep your brain alive, wake up your feet.

My feet aren’t cold anymore because they are alive. Just as you don’t need to wear gloves inside in the winter, you don’t need to cover your feet. Each barefoot step from tile to carpet to wood to grass sends information to your brain. Your brain suffers when your feet are stiff and silent.

If you want to keep your brain alive, release your poor feet. They deserve it. Not to be dramatic or anything, but waking up your feet is like learning you’ve always had the power to fly—you just didn’t know it.

Stay tuned for practical tips so you can wake up your feet and save your life!

1. That statistic reflects a much older population. Since I was relatively young and had no comorbidities other than latent osteoporosis, I was set to recover fully.

2. By the way, in 2019, an ambulance ride, major surgery, and eight in the hospital with no travel insurance cost me $3400 in France.