Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Going under the knife

Well, we've decided to get surgery done on little Miss Lena. After 9 months of physical therapy it has come to a point where we've done as much good as we can... and it just isn't enough. We'll still have to do lots of physical therapy after surgery, but this will get her ahead of the curve.


Oddly enough the surgery will only be on her right leg - which was deemed the "better" of the two last year. If you recall, last year we were told that lefty was "for sure" going to need surgery and that physical therapy would be very difficult even for a professional to get just the right stretches in to correct her tripod, and that righty was just a rubber crowbar that needed some strengthening and corrected posture. We started physical therapy essentially only to fix righty because Dr. England believed that leg could be fixed with physical therapy, but that if it couldn't he wanted to do both legs at the same time. Made sense to us! Well, somehow we magically fixed lefty... but righty is flat and curving in (I guess you could call it a partial relapse??).

We're still in shock and of course left the appointment without asking any questions. In fact, we left without realizing he only wanted to do surgery on one leg. We had to call back! The surgery is schedule for April 18th (Good Friday - that's good luck, right??). We have many weeks ahead of us to ask questions and verify our course, and although this is scary it does feel right. Our doctor is not very "knife happy" and wouldn't be recommending this surgery unless it were totally necessary. Odds of having TWO children with clubfeet not need any surgery is probably impossible.

Any words of advice from all of you that have had children undergo a surgery??