For many years, I wondered how I had developed this fetish but never really explored it because it didn't interfere with my normal heterosexual activities and I have always kept it private and did not make it a part of any relationship or my marriage. But in poring through some old family photographs recently, I happened upon a picture of me at about three years of age that was taken during a picnic and showed me standing with a man who was a friend of my parents. He was behind me with his hands on my shoulders, crouched down slightly and smiling at the camera. I was standing between his legs and had no interest in the photographer because I was staring at the plaster walking cast on his right foot. Seeing this photograph finally resolved my personal mystery of the vague, recurring image of a man in a cast that I had occasionally as a youngster. This simply turned out to be a very early memory which lurked at the fringes of recollection and, like my first true memories of people with a cast on their foot, created pleasurable feelings which I later came to recognize as erotic. This realization came at about the age of seven or eight when I discovered that they were the same pleasurable feelings that I had when I saw attractive women's feet or, particularly, when I secretly tried on their shoes and had my first profound sexual stirrings. By the age of ten, I started to become aroused by the feet and footwear of certain girls in my class but still hadn't thought much more about casts as no one had yet appeared in our school wearing any sort of leg cast. But all that would change during the winter of sixth grade and my attraction to casts would become established permanently and would influence my life thereafter.

One Monday morning in January, the teacher announced that one our classmates had fractured her ankle while ice skating on Friday evening. We were told that it was not a complicated fracture and that our classmate would be returning tomorrow and would be wearing a cast for about six weeks. When I heard this news, I was surprised at how aroused it made me and how anxious I was for the opportunity to finally have a close-up view of a girl's foot in a cast. The next morning she returned to school accompanied by her mother. She moved slowly into the classroom and was very self-conscious as twenty-five of her classmates watched closely as she maneuvered with her crutches. At first, she was partially hidden from my view and somehow her walking movements seemed strange to me and not like others I had seen using crutches. I then realized that she was not using her crutches for propulsion but had them more for balance and was actually walking slowly with both feet. When she finally came into my view, I saw the walking cast on her left leg and its image is as clear in my mind today as it was nearly forty years ago. At that moment, all of the attributes of a walking cast that I still find erotically appealing were etched into my psyche. I recall the snow-white plaster contours of her leg and foot and the way that the plaster on the sole was molded to incorporate the green rubber walking heel which elevated the cast on its own pedestal. The rocking movement of the cast with each step fascinated me and remains one of the most enchanting characteristics of a traditional walking cast. For the first time, I heard the delightful, subtle, hollow thump the walking heel makes when it strikes a hard surface; a sound that still excites me today as I stride along in a walking cast.

All of this was new and very exciting to me, but it would still be a couple of days before I would experience that unique attribute of a traditional walking cast that would turn it into such a potent erotic object for me. In the interim, she quickly became comfortable moving around the school without her crutches so I was eager for every opportunity to see her walk with that magnificent cast and savor its exotic motion. Since it was winter, her toes were covered by an off-white wool sock which had been pulled over the front of the foot portion of the cast and had left me wondering when I would ever get to see the entire cast. It was in the early afternoon a few days later and we were quietly working on a lesson when I heard the thump of her cast on the floor and looked anxiously in her direction. She was proceeding to the front of the room and, when she passed by my seat and stopped at the teacher's desk to ask a question, was not more than eight feet away and in plain view. To my astonishment, she had removed the sock covering her toes and the entirety of her cast was now fully visible. I was oblivious to everything else as I fixated on how her toes projected from the front of the cast and how they were framed by the narrow fold of stockinette fabric that had been turned back along the base of her toes to form the edge of the cast. Normally, when we see a person's bare toes the remainder of the foot is also bare and fully visible, or is in some sort of revealing footwear. So it was oddly very exciting, to see her bare toes while the rest of her foot was concealed and immobile in the cast. It fascinated me to see the way her toes hung free in the air and moved without restriction while being kept well above the floor due to the elevation of the cast by the walking heel. When she walked, they never touched the floor as the cast rocked with her stride; but simply became ornaments on an exotic piece of open-toed footwear. I would take that vision to bed with me that evening and was unprepared for how pleasurable and intense my private, prepubescent sexual explorations became. This was unlike anything that I had experienced before and I simply took joy in being obsessed with her cast.

We had known each other throughout grammar school and were friendly, so my curiosity about her cast seemed natural and this gave me the opportunity to observe it closely and inquire about it during our conversations. She was happy to answer my questions about what it felt like on her foot and what it was like to walk in. One day while talking with her, I rubbed the surface of her cast and, knowing better since I had worn a forearm cast a couple of years earlier, remarked that the inside of the cast must be awfully rough and uncomfortable against her foot. She assured me that the inside of the cast was actually soft and padded and felt very nice on her foot. When I inquired what it was like to walk without your foot flexing or your toes touching the ground, she told me that it felt strange at first but that what she really liked was the feeling of the cast along the arch of her foot when walking. This confirmed my suspicion that the sensation in the foot while walking in a cast was probably unique and was one that I was certain would be arousing to me if I ever experienced it. Until this time, the thought or sight of a walking cast had created vague, sensations of arousal that I realized were just another part of my growing attraction to female feet. However, after the experience with my classmate I perceived irresistible, intrinsic, erotic qualities in a traditional walking cast and it quickly became the thing that I most desired and yearned to wear one.

Being placed in a walking cast when you are eleven years old would strictly be a matter of medical necessity and not one of recreational casting. I contemplated dropping a heavy object on my foot or inflicting a cast-requiring injury in some other way but realized that it could easily turn more serious and abandoned those ideas. As the years in junior high and high school progressed, my desire to wear a walking cast never lessened and was heightened every time that I glimpsed one or had a schoolmate who was wearing one that I could watch day after day for weeks. I became interested in the way my desire for a cast differed depending on the gender of the wearer. When a woman wore the cast, my desire was highly erotic and I wanted to wear one in order to satisfy those urges. In the case of a male cast wearer, my feeling was always one of envy rather than arousal; I simply wanted to be the one wearing the cast so that I could then use it for my private purposes. I read all that I could find regarding casts, started to collect pictures of people wearing casts when they appeared in magazines and newspapers, and began to experiment with self-casting when my parents were out of the house. It was enough to give me some of the sensation of what foot and ankle immobilization felt like, but I never had the opportunity to wear any of these for more than a few hours which greatly dismayed me. It seemed as though I would have an interminable wait until I left home for college or even later before I would finally have the privacy and independence to be able to apply a walking cast and to wear it for an extended period. But, as often happens in life, fate played its hand and I got my wish - albeit at a price.