One more cup of coffee

Getting used to no casts

I still need to upload all the new pictures, but here are a couple from the night we took Nathan’s casts off. The top left one is with his casts unrolled and draped all over him (we hadn’t pulled the gauze off yet). As you can see, he was pretty excited about having them come off. The bottom is with the casts completely off, and the top right is with his braces one. The bar connecting the two shoes is called a Denis Brown splint. With club feet, the shoes are set at a 70° angle. 

He’s still getting used to them, and not entirely happily. Mostly it seems like he’s just having a hard time finding new positions to get comfortable in. He wakes up in the middle of night, or from naps in the day, pretty fussy. He usually calms down fast, but he’s clearly not enthralled with them just yet.

Putting the shoes on, especially with both of them at an angle, is HARD. Thursday morning, it took me over ten minutes to get his shoes off and back on so I could get his clothes off. It’s also harder because Nathan really doesn’t like it. The nurse pointed out to us a while back that when the casts came off that he wouldn’t be used to being touched on his legs at all, so that might be part of what makes him so mad.

Fortunately, the shoes come off the split easily (they’re held on with a big thumbscrew on the bottom), and we’ve found it’s easier to put his feet into the shoes, then attach them back to the bar. On Thursday, the first full day in the braces, we discovered in the evening that one of his feet was completely out, and another one was mostly out. And we had been worried that we might have had them too tight. Clearly not.

I had been a little worried about changing his diaper, but it’s actually pretty easy – we just lift his legs up by the bar and slide the diaper between his legs. Meredith had originally thought that it might be nice to take his shoes off for diaper changes anyway, just to give him a small break, but given what a pain it is to get his shoes on, we’ll clearly not be doing that. We’ll also be trying to pick clothes that can be put on and taken off without needing to go over his feet.