Every Picture May Tell a Story – But Not the Whole Story

We were asked to visit a young person who supposedly needed help with a serious foot problem. After searching for the address, we finally found the house. A middle-aged woman answered the door.

I explained why we were there and that someone had told us a young person in the home needed help with a foot. She shook her head and said we must have the wrong house—there was no young person there with a foot problem.

But there was something in her eyes, and in the pause in her voice, that told me there was more to the story. Gently, I asked if she knew of anyone in the neighborhood who might have a foot problem. She hesitated, then quietly said, “They might have been talking about me.”

She explained that when she was a toddler, doctors removed her left foot. Her family was very poor, and her parents could not afford a prosthetic foot. So her father did what he could: he found a small plastic cup, pushed the stump of her leg into it so she could stand, pulled a sock over it, and tied a shoe tightly on top. That’s how she learned first to stand, and then to walk.

Each year, as she grew, her parents added another plastic cup on top of the old one. She rolled up her pant leg and showed us what she had been walking on: a stack of plastic cups, wrapped in a sock, crammed into a tennis shoe.

We asked her to remove the shoe and the cups. As I feared, the end of her leg was black and looked as if gangrene was beginning to set in.

We took her to a private hospital, where the doctor confirmed that the stump was turning gangrenous. We paid for the surgery she needed, a proper prosthetic, special shoes, and physical therapy.

We never know where we will be led—or whose hidden story we will be invited to share.