Prosthetic Appointment #1 - Jan. 20

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!