The doctor sees Dale struggling to balance upon his new hand feet. Fortunately, Animalia Inc. is always prepared for situations like this.
"Here, why don't you use this for a while? Your feet are a completely different shape now. There might be a small adjustment period. Your posture will likely never be exactly the same."
The doctor was setting a light metal walker in front of Dale. He grabbed it and managed to get his bearings. Once he'd managed to teeter across the room a few times with the rickety wide frame ahead of him, he finally spoke up.
"This does kinda help I guess, doc, but come on, I ain't old enough to be seen with one o' these yet. 'Sides, I gotta long bus ride home, and I don' really wanna lug this on and off with me."
The doctor sighed. Leave it to middle aged macho patients to never do what's best for themselves. At least he'd expected this and thought his backup plan might be better than nothing. The doctor opened a cabinet door and pulled out a distinguished-looking cane. Not the most support in the world but maybe Dale wouldn't fall flat on his face, too many times.
"Is this better?"
"Hm. Still makes me feel old. But what's the word? Sophisticated?" Dale took a step, not as difficult as it was at first, but his balance was still off. The cane helped him compensate, though, so that was a success. "Yeah, this will have to do," said Dale. The doctor couldn't help but peek outside the door as Dale left just to make sure he was going to make it. Yeah, Dale seemed okay, and getting less wobbly as he went. As he said, it would have to do.
Unfortunately Dale was in for something of a rude awakening since his socks and shoes didn't fit anymore. The carpeted lobby of the Animalia office felt nice, but stepping outside onto the concrete sidewalk was quite different. Still not too bad, until he got the hang of walking with his cane and paid less attention to his steps. His left paw came down into the dampness where it felt like someone had spat. "Ew!" he said, lifting it up and wiping it against his right pants leg. Yuck! At least he made it to the bus stop without further incident.
But when the bus finally came, well, it was a city bus. Dale grabbed the hand rails with his arm-hands and stepped up into the large vehicle. Each step felt just like pressing a hand down onto the steps of a dirty bus. He could feel every pebble and piece of dirt left behind by people's shoes as they'd boarded and disembarked. They were kind of digging into his skin, which was not great. But the actual aisle was even worse--sticky, wet in places, gritty in others. "What did I get myself into here?"
The worst part was when he stepped in gum. It stuck to his foot-fingers and no amount of flexing them seemed to get it off! The man gagged a few times and then did his best to ignore it. Finally, the bus stopped at his apartment building and he could get out of this mess. Walking around barefoot in there wasn't so bad, but the first thing he did when he got back to the apartment building was decide he had to wash his feet. He got into a little to much of a hurry on his way there--even with the cane he almost took too careless a step and came close to falling over. But he made it into the bathroom, turned on the water, and took a seat on the edge of the tub. Just soaking them helped a little bit, and it occurred to him that he could probably wash them like his hands. He grabbed a bottle of body wash with his left foot, opened the lid with one of his original hands, and let his left foot squeeze the bottle onto his right foot. He was doing it! He's hand-feet grabbed each other (the strangest experience so far in his life!) and lathered the soap between their fingers. Then he rinsed them and made sure they were very dry before he tried to walk again.
"Maybe I can get some heavy gloves or something," he thought to himself, staring at what he'd be walking on from now on, watching them dry. "I'm really starting to miss socks and shoes more than I thought."