My wife was born with a club foot that was initially treated (rebroken) but subsequently neglected when she was a child (“absent mother” would be putting it lightly). We’ve seen two orthopedic surgeons that have looked at her foot and seen x-rays and have concluded that things have healed and progressed about as well as you could expect from her situation.
I’m no expert in any sense, and I’m not going to argue with professionals concerning what is or isn’t a positive outcome, but she began having discomfort on the leg when she was 18, and twenty years later, she spends many days in crippling pain. She has virtually no capacity for dorsiflexion on her smaller leg, and the soleus/gastroc have almost totally atrophied. From what I can find, atrophy of those muscles is fairly normal with a club foot, but I’m not sure that the pain she’s experiencing is typical. If she walks a bit too much or tries to ride her bike too much (which she loves more than anything), she can’t walk the next day - or sometimes, the next week.
She’s hitting a point where I’m sure a lot of people going through chronic pain hit - the “whatever, this is just the way life is” phase, and she sort of seems to want to give up on finding some treatment. We went to a podiatrist, as I had horrible tendonitis when I was a kid and orthotics really helped me to be able to walk and corrected my arch, and the orthotics she got have helped a bit, but clearly more needs to be done to strengthen her weak areas.
Here’s a front picture:
You can see the right leg is clearly smaller, and you can see how the ankle is shifting inwards.
Here is a side picture of the right leg:
The red highlighted area is what hurts her the most, and it radiates outwards from there.
The last picture is a rear view and it’s the most obvious. The ankle kind of shifting medially, and the sheer size difference between her R leg and her other calf. The heel on her right foot gives her a ton of discomfort too, which is probably bad tendonitis as well.
@Dr_Grove_Higgins wondered if you could point us in the right direction or have any suggestions.
Lot of smart people on here as well - would love some help here. My wife can find it hard to accept help sometimes. I did ask her permission to make this post and post these pictures and she was quite receptive to it, so it’s an encouraging sign and I’m hoping her willingness to put herself out there and ask for help can yield some much-needed relief for her. She’s a super positive and fun person in spite of all this - I just want her to hurt less.