24 Unusual Body Things People Didn’t Know Weren’t Normal

23.

“I was born with one leg longer than the other. It’s about 2 cm (3/4 inch) longer, which doesn’t seem like much but screwed up my knees and back really badly. The weird part is how it is. I don’t have one specific bone longer than the other — the whole leg is proportionally longer. I had one doctor tell me that if you took an X-ray of me from the waist down and cut it in half, you’d think it was from two different people. Nobody knows why. No doctor I’ve ever seen has seen anybody like me. I even had to calm a podiatrist down once because he didn’t know what to do, and it freaked him out. A physical therapist once brought students in to see how one side of my buttocks was visibly larger than the other due to the way I have to stand.”

“I still, as an adult, cannot bear weight on both legs at the same time. I just never learned how because I couldn’t until I got a correctly sized-lift at age 26. My official diagnosis is skeletal asymmetry, or even more specifically, ‘significant idiopathic leg length difference and iliac rotational asymmetry.’ For the most part, since I wear an in-shoe lift, it’s an invisible thing, but it causes issues with all kinds of things like stairs and slippery floors. It makes me very clumsy.”

—omgitsaclaire