By now, I'm sure no one is surprised when I say that E.R. took her first steps on her own yesterday. Three days after getting her leg, and probably the 5th time she had practiced with it.
We were practicing out in the cul-de-sac and G.J. (who is a Pop-It lover) had a big Pop-It he was popping in front of E.R. (who is also a Pop-It lover). She got so excited that she pulled her hands out of mine and covered her mouth in an exaggerated giggle. I looked down in surprise as she stood steady on her own!
Our neighbors were with us and very excited for her. I cautiously let her take a few tipsy steps, and then she took off down the street! I caught her as she was falling after stepping into the curb. She walked up our short driveway, and we went inside to take a break.
The funny thing is that all of us watching were waiting for her to realize that she was WALKING! But she didn't seem phased by it all (which is not her usual personality - she can get excited over anything and nothing). But this was different. It was like all this energy that had been lying dormant in our little girl since her surgery 10 weeks ago, busted out. And she walked as if she knew she always would when she had the chance.
Here E.R. is dancing. She loves to dance, and it has been 2 1/2 months! Unfortunately she is still learning to maneuver her legs. Her prosthetic foot got caught in the crack in the deck board, and she fell, flying right out of her prosthetic leg that was caught tightly in the crack! She was spread-eagle on the deck and looked at me with concern, while I calmly unwrenched her precious new leg and said, "oops!".
So today turned out to be the day Chris and I have waited for over 14 months, and E.R. has waited way longer.E.R. had her regularly scheduled check with her surgeon in the afternoon. But in the morning we got a call from Shriners that the prosthetic lab was working on her leg all day, and MIGHT be done by her appointment time, and that we should stop by. I was warned not to get my hopes up, but of course that had already happened!
A few hours later I realized that I hadn't gotten E.R. shoes for the fitting yet, since I had thought we still had a week. So E.R., J.T. and I rushed to the shoe store. I didn't really know what to get except that they had to be as flat as possible, so we bought four pairs that looked like they would work, and I decided to let our prosthetist choose what would be best for our girl to learn to walk in.
So I packed extra snacks and toys for J.T. as I remembered how long we were in the prosthetic lab last time. We headed into Shriners after school and when we were checking in, I was told that our prosthetist had come looking for us about 20 minutes before. No one knew what it meant!
So we did our regular appointment, and of course all of the snacks were gone by the end of that, and then headed around the corner. We waited in the reception area, and the coordinator said "I haven't heard yet!" By now I'm starting to think that it isn't ready and no one wants to break the bad news. We waited for what seemed like forever. Then our prosthetist came out and said she had just checked, and it was DONE.
You know those feelings you have sometimes when you realize that your whole life just changed in the last moment, and nothing will be the same ever again? Well that's what I had when I heard the word "done".
So she brought in E.R.'s new leg, and began to work to get it to fit. E.R. still has lots of swelling, so it was a bit of a challenge. But finally it was on, and E.R. was up standing straight and tall for the first time in her life! I took pictures and then put the camera down so I could help the girl walk. I wanted so badly for Chris to be there, but it all happened too fast for us to plan well.
Holding tightly on to one of us with both hands, she was able to walk around the room and into the hall. She would have walked her little self right out of Shriners, but we had to bring her back to check her leg. Her leg looked okay after the walking, except for that darn open wound. It oozed out onto the sock, and our prosthetist told me would really have to watch that, and not let her walk for as long as we had just talked about. I could already feel the battles coming over that...
The most interesting thing is that I was expecting some sort of excitement, or shock, or light-bulb moment from E.R. where I saw that finally everything she had been through now made sense. But it never came. She was so determined to walk that she didn't seem as excited as she usually gets about new experiences. And an uncanny feeling began to wash over me as I realized that I think this girl has understood everything all along. I always assumed she only understood things at a 2 year-old level, in bits and pieces. But as I watched her at Shriners today I realized I was wrong. This kid understood all of the conversation we've had. She recognized what her Cabbage Patch Kid's foot symbolized. I think she got it all...
I think somewhere deep down she was ready for the first day of the rest of her life.
Today, again I trudged into Shriners with all four kids after school. We didn't have to wait long which was nice.
The kids tanked up on granola bars, cheese sticks and juice boxes in the exam room, and listened to an unsolicited lecture on how long they should wash their hands by the nurse. My kids can be such good sports sometimes.
E.R.'s surgeon seemed disappointed that she wasn't more healed. She still has an open wound on the side of her leg that hasn't closed. We set another appointment for 3 weeks from now, hoping that she will be healed by then.
But the big news is in the next post!!!
Today, the little kids and I picked up the boys at school, came home for a snack, and then headed to Shriners for E.R.'s first prosthetic fitting.
J.T. sat in a stroller, and the boys helped me entertain him and give him a bottle.
The prosthetist brought in a mold of something that is similar to what E.R.'s leg will look like. I am still a total novice to this field of medicine/therapy, so it was really hard for me to picture what it will look like eventually. Mostly I just had to trust that she knows what she is doing!
We had a heck of a time getting it to fit on E.R. In fact at first, it just didn't. Apparently E.R.'s leg has swollen quite a bit since surgery, so it is bigger around and without the muscle/bone definition it had when she was originally molded. The swelling will go down, but for now it throws things off a bit.
The funny part is that the leg mold just didn't fit, and fell off a few times. So for the rest of the hour+ that we were there the same scene played over and over:
Our kind and very positive prosthetist would try to get the leg to stay on. E.R. would watch her and then say sadly but firmly, "It don't fit." Then the prosthetist would look in her face, smile at her and try to assure her by saying, "It will fit. I'm DETERMINED to make it fit." E.R. would look at her with sympathy and simply say, "It don't fit." They had this conversation over and over to the point that the prosthetist and I would already be hiding our chuckles before E.R. said "It don't fit". But E.R. saw absolutely no humor in it all. It was like she had some inner knowledge that she was bound to only have one leg the rest of her life, and we were fools to keep trying. The interesting thing is that until the end of our appointment, over an hour later, she was right.
So we had lots of time to amuse ourselves as our prosthetist would leave us, make some adjustments to the test leg, come back, try it, have the same conversation with E.R. again, and then leave to adjust it again. So in the meantime we amused ourselves with the camera...
So the prosthetist was finally fairly happy with the fit. Here is E.R. standing for the first time...
As we were packing up to go, she told me we would only need one more appointment, and not two! That means E.R. will have her new leg in 2 weeks!
So yesterday evening while I was at work, G.J. was upset about something and went to lay on his bed. He started screaming in pain, and Chris rushed in to see what had happened. G.J. was clutching his eye and screaming that it hurt!
This triggered some major anxiety in G.J. that we hadn't seen for awhile. He refused to let anyone look in his eye. He slept for a few hours, cried a lot, and Chris and I weren't sure what to do. When G.J. is in that emotional space you can't talk or reason with him. He is just panicked and unable to think clearly and calmly.
This morning the pain wasn't any better, and his eye was red and puffy from G.J. pressing on it. He spent the morning with us taking E.R. to her Shriners appointment. Then I had to stop by work to take care of something, and then we were finally able to get to G.J.'s appointment.
His doctor put some green dye in his eye and looked in it with a black light. She was pretty surprised and said she saw something pretty big on his iris. I could tell she was worried, and she left quickly to get him an emergency appointment with an opthamologist in the building. Another doctor came in to try to look in his eye, and by then I realized this might be serious. Both doctors quizzed him on what could have happened - saying that it looked like some sort of trauma. G.J. honestly had no ideas for them. He didn't know what had happened!
We went to grab some lunch before the next appointment, and Chris decided to come help. He met us and took G.J. to the appointment, since someone needed to feed J.T. who had been an amazingly good sport through all of this. We also had M.C. who needed to be picked up at school.
So G.J. saw the specialist who was able to get in his eye and remove a microscopic piece of white plastic tucked into his eyelid. It was scraping his eye every time he blinked! After the removal and some numbing cream, G.J. felt like a new man.
It will take a couple of days for his eye to be back to normal, but apparently eyes heal quickly...
This qualifies for our freaky family list of "What in the World?"
Well our girl, being the survivor that she is, surprised the heck out of me on Monday.
She was whining and crying in her crib as she woke up from her nap. When I went in to check on her, she was crying and saying "OW!" I looked down and saw that she had ripped off all the dressing and bandages on her leg and it was bare and bleeding a bit. It was the first time either of us had seen her leg, and I didn't know if the blood was from the unhealed wound, or if she had picked open some stitches!
I spent the next hour and a half trying to get a live person on the phone at Shriners to give us some advice. Chris came home and we bandaged her up again. We were finally told to do just that, and then to bring her in for her already-scheduled appointment Wednesday morning.
So then this morning, J.T., G.J. (who had hurt his eye and was waiting to get into the doctor himself), and I took E.R. into Shriners. Her surgeon was pretty happy overall with how it looked, and now we just need to keep a couple of band-aids on the healing scab.
We went over to the prosthetics lab at the end of the hall and made E.R.'s 3 appointments for that process. At this point she is scheduled to be all done on Feb. 10th.
This girl wants the world to know that she is DONE with recovering! She is ready to get on with her life.
Our hearts are hurting over the tragedies facing our Haitian neighbors.
Chris wants to get down there so badly. We have been sponsoring a teacher in the orphanage school that Chris visited 6 years ago. It seems so long ago, and then not so long at the same time.
We are praying for the millions of people who lost family, friends, neighbors, homes, workplaces, churches, and cherished pieces of their history.
May the world's help get there in time to make a difference in their pain...
Today I got to give my first referral to a family! I got to be the person on the other end of the phone as the lives of one loving and waiting family intersected with the life of a little boy (who needs that family very much) on the other side of the world.
An amazing and humbling experience. A day none of us will ever forget.
I'm sitting with my hot chocolate recovering from the headache I've had since Saturday night when I actually looked carefully at E.R.'s brand new adoption decree.
If you aren't familiar with adoption, once a child is adopted internationally, they generally need to be re-adopted in their state (depending on their state). So all their international paperwork has to be filed in a local court, and then a judge finalizes their adoption in their new state. From this they can get a birth certificate from their state, and a SS card. There are other ways and orders to getting these documents - but that is how we did it.
So on Friday, her decree came in the mail! This means her adoption is recognized here in our Oregon court. Huge waves of relief washed over me to see that piece of paper and to know that process was over.
Then Saturday night I read it carefully and to my horror, I realized that where her birthday should have been, was instead her placement date. That means that according to our new decree E.R. is not 2 1/2 years old, but about 7 months old! Ahhhh!!!
Since this is the process we used to get her an Oregon birth certificate and SS card, I was having huge anxiety about how to halt the paper trail that had been started. The last thing I want is for her birthdate to be 2 years off! I told our pediatrician about it early this morning at J.T.'s appt. and she joked that I would have to homeschool E.R. since there is no way she could wait until she was 7 to start kindergarten, and a school wouldn't register her if she was only 3 on paper! I tried to manage a pained smile to acknowledge her humor, but that was about all I could muster, since at that moment I felt no humor in someone's mistake that created such a huge headache for us.
I decided my best bet was to get over to the courthouse in person to get things straightened out. So I lugged E.R. on my back in my Ergo carrier, and J.T. rode in a little stroller. I smiled kindly but unapologetically at the ugly glares I received from the security guard, knowing full well there is an unwritten rule about bringing kids into a courthouse. I was determined to get those 2 years back for this little girl who had been through too much in her life to be robbed of any of it. And there is NO WAY that she wants to be J.T.'s YOUNGER sister!
So I carried J.T.'s stroller, clutching our adoption documents, down several flights of stairs to the basement. The lady who works down there was definitely shocked to see us coming in the door of her quiet office. I just about knocked her over with kindness - which usually works with grumpy court folks (thank you Lord for all the time I've spent in courthouses). In these situations it usually works to play dumb about any procedures you actually may understand, and just be a really honest, pleasant, confused person in need of the expertise that only the person in front of you can provide. By the time we left she was actually trying to pronounce "Elmo" in response to E.R.'s babbling conversation about her Elmo sticker.
Turns out that the decree is not sent on to the birth certificate office. All of our court documents were correct, so much to my relief, my panic can now subside. E.R. will remain 2 1/2, and our new friend in the courthouse basement whipped up a new, correct adoption decree for us. When she handed it to me, I exclaimed "That is a beautiful thing!!", and she almost smiled.
We headed out into the freezing cold Oregon morning chatting and cheering about how E.R. was 2 again. The attorney walking in front of us turned around to smile as E.R. was yelling "Woo-Hoo!!" and pumping her fist in the air about being 2 again.
It's almost as if she understood everything we just went through - which makes her so much older than 7 months...
So yesterday E.R. and I headed into Shriners just before 5:00am. We got set up in the room that we had for her recovery after surgery. I don't think she recognized it, but it brought back memories, some good, many not-so-good to me. We shared the room with a family of a baby with club feet.
The procedure today was to remove her cast and check her healing. Best case scenario was that she would be doing great, they could take the pin out of her ankle bones, prepare the first mold for her prosthetic foot, and simply wrap her in a soft wrap (like an ace bandage). If she wasn't ready, we were probably looking at another cast for 2 weeks. By now I knew we could survive another 2 weeks if it was necessary, but it would be SO nice to be on our way to the next stage! If the best case scenario happened, the surgeon said it would take about an hour. Less than an hour if they couldn't do the mold yet.
E.R. was ready to go home after we had been there about 20 minutes. She got pretty mad at me when I wouldn't put her clothes back on and take her home. A big stuffed My Little Pony helped for awhile.
I carried her sedated little self down about 7:40am. There was some kind of computer glitch with paperwork, I think, so we waited awhile. Then they decided to just go ahead since she had been waiting so long. At 7:50, I left her and returned to the room to wait. The nurse told me I would be called when they began the procedure, but I never got a call. By now, I assume they know what they are doing, and I just chose to rest, since there was a LONG day ahead of me and I had to emotionally prepare for E.R.'s reaction to the anesthesia.
To my surprise about 35 minutes later two nurses came in with a calm, peaceful little E.R. They handed her to me and the prosthetist came in to tell me that everything had gone wonderfully. She made the first mold, and E.R.'s leg looked great. I felt E.R.'s left leg dangling down and realized that she felt lighter because she was CAST-LESS! I had to sit down on the bed with her because the relief just washed over me. As all the shock was wearing off (since I wasn't ready for her to even be done with the procedure - let alone already up here), I also realized that she was completely peaceful and not screaming and thrashing as usual. Part of me was afraid to hope since there was still time for her to fall apart, but the rest of me was realizing this was COMPLETELY different than our last two times coming out of surgery/procedures. The nurse told me that they hadn't had to put her under completely since there was no cutting or stitching needed. So the medication that she doesn't tolerate well was never used!!!! Oh the joy!
I snuggled on the bed with E.R. as I had seen many other parents do post-surgery (and hadn't been able to do with her before!). She was calm and quiet and seemed relieved to see me. There was no trauma, no trying to jump off the bed, just peaceful recovery. Within about 10 minutes she was sitting up, asking for juice, and her clothes, and ready to pack up and go home!
Today she was given a Cabbage Patch doll that she had picked out way before her surgery. The doll had been given an amputation on her left foot, and has a prosthetic foot as close to E.R.'s as possible with a doll. The prosthetist showed her how to put the doll's foot on. E.R. loved it.
We were in the car 4 1/2 hours after arrival. I think both of us felt much lighter!
E.R. has had about 24 hours now to get used to her new leg. She is able to really crawl and play on the floor now, and she can use her left leg for the first time in 7 weeks. She is not going to walk on it for at least a week. But it is fun to see her getting around, and completely comfortable with her leg. She isn't concerned at all. In fact the cast was so annoying that I think she is just 100% relieved to have 2 legs now!
We go back in for a follow-up check with her surgeon in a week. No more inpatient appointments for us!!!
I really think the hardest parts may be over! Thank you for all the prayers and support over the last year, and especially the last 2 months. We are on the home stretch now...
By now, I'm sure no one is surprised when I say that E.R. took her first steps on her own yesterday. Three days after getting her leg, and probably the 5th time she had practiced with it.
Here E.R. is dancing. She loves to dance, and it has been 2 1/2 months! Unfortunately she is still learning to maneuver her legs. Her prosthetic foot got caught in the crack in the deck board, and she fell, flying right out of her prosthetic leg that was caught tightly in the crack! She was spread-eagle on the deck and looked at me with concern, while I calmly unwrenched her precious new leg and said, "oops!".
