I was born in 1977. My father is a police officer and my mother is a famous doll maker. When my mother was pregnant, ultrasounds were not the norm, so my parents had no idea about my limb deficiency. My mother says she would tell the doctor something felt different throughout her pregnancy. "This one doesn't kick as much", she would tell him, comparing me to her two other normal pregnancies 10 and 8 years prior. When I was born, I was taken away without explanation and my parents were left to imagine the worst (anyone see 'It's Alive'?). My mother says the doctor mentioned that I was deformed and they did not see me until several hours later. When they did finally meet me, my mother says she thought I was beautiful. And what she noticed, more than anything, was the fact that I had her father's eyes. He was a fisherman and died before I was born.
I've heard many people on this forum talk about the 'wait and see' approach, which is mainly what my parents did for the first few months. They weren't sure of what I could or could not do, but the doctors were pretty sure I would never walk (I guess they would have thought the baton, baseball and cheerleading would have been impossible too... hahaha). I don't know my classification (perhaps I should find out), but my left femur is very short and my right is gone totally, with only a small tibia. There was a little foot on the right side, and the descriptions from my parents vary. From what I gather, it was sideways and had only a few toes on it. There are no pictures of this little foot, which makes me sort of sad. Not that I would sit around missing it and really be 'sad' at all about it being gone, but it was a part of me that I don't remember and there is no record of it. I have recently thought about requesting all photographs of me from the Shriners and maybe I can find a picture of the little foot there.
When I was a baby, my sister and brother (8 and 10 years older) would race home to change my diapers. I learned how to stand by pulling up on a chair. Early on, a practitioner made me a 'bucket' type socket with a hole out the right side for my sideways tibia/foot. The 'bucket' had a little wooden leg attached to it. The only function this thing had was to help me to stand.
It was a couple next door that first told my parents about the Shriners. The man there was a Shriner and told my parents there were people that could help us. I went to the Greenville Shrine and had corrective surgery on my right side when I was about 12 months old. I was walking with a prosthesis by around 18 months.