Seriously?
Picturing Leaffan walking with a left foot drop. Thread is a zombie. Really?
As I said in post 10 a couple years ago, foot drop can be an early indication of a more serious problem. So don’t ignore it.
Not to scare you but foot drop was the first real indication that my friend had ALS. It went away after about 8 months, and so did he.
This matches quite closely symptoms I developed with lower lumbar disk problems. You would really need an MRI or CAT scan to tell exactly what’s going on. If this is still bothering you, you need to see a neurologist.
I’m late to the discussion, but I developed a foot drop after bumping the top of my left foot against a coffee table’s lower shelf a couple of years ago. It was quite painful, but it didn’t get bad or dangerous to mobility for several months.
I finally went to SportsMed without a referral. Neither images, examination, nor “nerve conduction test” (EMG) disclosed any physical problem, so they prescribed a rather expensive orthotic to ensure I didn’t trip over my own foot. That was not optimal, since my job often required me to walk 8 to 10 thousand steps per day.
I went to a local physical therapy clinic, again without a referral. During the ensuing three months I basically had to retrain my left leg to walk properly, and to rebuild some of the lower leg musculature, which had obviously atrophied too much to be a happy thing. The orthotic became useless after two sessions with therapists, and I haven’t used it since.
Some have mentioned underlying medical problems, and I agree that having them checked out is a common sense approach.
After I regained most of the mobility, confidence, and strength I also began to have a most annoying tingling, but in both feet, and without anything I would characterize as pain. I saw a surgeon last August about it; her diagnosis was that it was most likely no more than the damage from osteo-arthritis (I’m 66), and that surgery was not indicated in the least. At the same time all of this was going on there were other situations (based off a final breakup in my marriage) that occasioned several months of “treatment” by a Christian psychologist/counselor. I have no doubt that underlying emotional stress had a lot to do with this whole series of events. Divorce was final last October, so that helped quite a lot, too.
I’m still hoping to return to work full-time before long. Thankfully, my Company insisted on keeping me as “part time/on call” to help when needed. (But I won’t be walking 8,000 steps a day!)
Foot drop was an early symptom of my FIL’s ALS. He had a shop and rigged up something involving an eye bolt on the toe box, a strap around his ankle and a spring in between. He died two years later, but in the meantime he was able to walk for over a year that way.
Oh FFS (yes, reported)