Land of 10,000 Stories: Little girl meets life's challenges feet first

Milan, Minnesota -- If you notice the feet before you're charmed by the sweet face, that's just fine with Lexi Dietz.

"Yep, I like to walk," says the little green-eyed girl from Milan, Minnesota as she teeters slightly from side to side in her ankle braces.

"That's all she wants to do now is just walk and walk," says Jamie Brouwer as she watches her daughter stroll though the house admiring her own footwork. "I can go backwards," says Lexi excitedly, "Look I'm going backwards!"

At five years old, Lexi has turned a corner on life.

"It's just a whole new world, isn't it?" asks Jamie as her daughter turns the corner into the living room of their one-story home. "Yep," responds Lexi without even a pause in her endless hike through the house.

Nine months ago Lexi wasn't walking at all. In fact at age two a doctor told her she would never walk. "Yeah," pipes up Lexi, "but I showed him." Her mother remembers the exchange. "She looked at the doctor and said 'I want to walk,' and he said, 'you will never walk,' and she said, 'I will walk!'"

Listening from across the room, Lexi proudly adds, "I showed him!"

Yet even Lexi realizes the determination that moved her feet cannot help her hands. They are small thin and hang limply at the ends of her arms. "They don't work like yours, 'cuz I was born like that," she explains. It is the only time in the day's conversations when Lexi speaks in hushed tones, eager to return to her favorite subject. "My feet are working better," she smiles.

Jamie had been told Lexi would probably die at birth. When she arrived, Lexi's intestines were outside her body, her limbs stiff and useless from a rare birth defect called Arthrogryposis. "It was the scariest thing I've ever gone through," recalls Jamie. But then Jamie started seeing things in her daughter that told her Lexi was going to find a way.

You see, before those feet at the end of those rigid legs started propelling Lexi around the house, she was teaching them to take over for her crippled hands.

"I noticed it first at six months old -- that's the first time I noticed her use her feet for something," recalls Jamie as Lexi reaches out to a stack of UNO playing cards with her toes, then carefully picks one up, holds it up to her face, then neatly discards it. "Just recently she started using both feet," says Jamie as Lexi reaches with her toes for another card.

"I got a blue," squeals the five-year-old. "I'm lucky!"

Few things surprise Jamie about her daughter anymore. "You cannot say 'you cannot do that.' She won't listen to you."

Once the card game is put away, Lexi turns her attention to lunch. Manipulating the butter knife between her toes, Lexi dips into a mayonnaise jar, spreads the topping on her bread, then gently peels off a piece of ham from a deli pack and places it with her toes on her sandwich.

Jamie sits nearby encouraging her daughter. More than anything she wants Lexi to be independent. As Lexi picks up the sandwich between her first and second toes it is clear she's done more than meet her mother halfway.

"I could never do what she does," says Jamie. "I wouldn't change her for anything. She has brought so much to my life about learning to love people for who they are and just acceptance."

By the time Lexi grasps her toothbrush with her toes and bends at the waist to reach her teeth, it is clear she has met more challenges in her first five years that sixth-year Harvard PhD.

"A little bit more mom?" she yells from the bathroom, still clenching the toothbrush handle in her toes. "A little bit more," Jamie responds as routinely as any mother of a five-year-old might.

But the thing about childhood challenges -- they just keep coming.

This fall Lexi started indergarten. In the months before her big day, Lexi started traveling with her mom to Gillette Children's Mobile Outreach Clinic in Willmar where equipment specialists and physical therapists help her prepare for the challenges of a classroom.

"Look at my 'E'" says Lexi proudly as she writes her name with a marker gripped by her toes. In a few minutes she will turn her attention to a computer keyboard, hunting and pecking various words with an extended toe.

Lori Larson, Lexi's longtime physical therapist, challenges Lexi in ways that would overwhelm most five-year-olds. "There's no doubt in my mind that as long as we give Lexi the proper tools she'll remain at the top of her class," says Larson. "She's very, very bright."

Among the tasks Larson assigns to Lexi is one that's particularly telling. "I'd like you to draw a picture of yourself," she tells Lexi. With her heel resting on the table top and the marker pinned between her toes, Lexi begins her self-portrait, adding both hair and her ankle braces.

But for all Lexi's attention to detail, Larson points out the one thing that's missing. Lexi has drawn a little girl without any arms. She has chosen to focus on what she has, rather than spend even a moment on those things that are of no use to her.

Back at home in Milan, Lexi is again on her feet and in a mood to show off. "Grandpa, look at me, I'm walking," she shouts from a distance to her grandfather Daryl Brouwer as he helps out in the yard. He smiles proudly. "She can do anything, you know."

Lexi has told her mother she'd like to be a doctor someday. "And she will be the first surgeon who uses her feet," says Jamie. "I have no doubt about that either."

As we say goodbye to the girl, it is appropriate that we take one last admiring look at those amazing feet. For whatever challenges lie ahead, be assured those feet will be giving Lexi a hand.

Click here for more information on Gillette Children's Mobile Outreach Clinic.

Click here for more information on arthrogryposis.

(Copyright 2009 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)