Lauren saw her orthopedic surgeon again yesterday. Her gait is actually worse than it was when it first started about 3 weeks ago. I took time off of work to take her myself instead of delegating to my (amazing) mom and (amazing) mom-in-law. This way I could speak with the surgeon and we could assess her together.
He agrees that something is wrong (duh). We are all on the same page now thinking it's her ankle. It's painful for her to get her ankle even to neutral. It's painful to bear weight. Something is making a popping sound in her ankle. She's holding her left leg out pretty far. At this point, nothing is showing up on x-ray. The plan is to wear a boot (walking cast) for a month and then if things aren't a lot better we're going to either do an MRI or CT scan of her ankle. He said he's not sure if this is a fracture we can't see on xray, a soft tissue problem, something resulting from her most recent fracture in June, something popping up from her surgery in March, or if she even has another tarsal coalition not showing up on xray. Because her gait looks eerily similar to how it did pre-surgery, except it's more painful now. I am genuinely hoping fixing this problem doesn't result in another surgery (first because surgery sucks, second because taking a lot of time off is a buzzkill because it prevents me from taking time off for vacations, etc). However we fix this problem, the goal is just to get her walking more functionally. Her mobility is majorly impacted by this new injury and it's only going to cause further mobility issues if we don't get it resolved. When does life settle down? Does it just not?
I'm in school now. I have about a week and a half left of this semester (5 week semesters). It's a lot more work than I expected! I can't say it's hard per say, but it's time consuming.
The good news is, today has been a fantastic day for behavior for Lauren. She got "super star" (earning a star for ever part of her day for following directions), she was good for speech therapy after school, and then for me this evening she took a bath, ate her bedtime snack, and then was so super snuggly at bedtime. I still rock her, and today she kept kissing my neck, face, arm, etc and telling me she loves me and I'm a "cute baby angel mommy". She told me she wants to let daddy rock her tomorrow (he always asks and she almost always says no). It was just one of those rare days where her behavior was awesome! She was pretty good at her appointment yesterday, but we waited a long time before seeing the doctor so total we were at the office for 2 hours. I really think she was as good as she was able to be...even if our visit involved eloping, telling a female resident "go away, I don't like you" (it turns out her hands were really cold), and purposefully wandering into the wrong room FIVE TIMES while coming back from going potty. Hey, she was happy.
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