Rewriting A Life Story Later In Life

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Gail Caldwell had long attributed her limp and her constant physical pain to her childhood bout of polio. So did the doctors she saw throughout her life.

But when Caldwell was in her late fifties, the pain became so severe, friends told her to seek a new opinion.

As Caldwell tells Here & Now's Robin Young, the doctor she saw ordered an X-ray and when he saw it, he told her she had no hip left.

Caldwell underwent a hip replacement and leg lengthening.

Her memoir "New Life, No Instructions" tells what it was like to change the preconceptions of her life and literally learn to walk again.

We revisit our conversation.