Growing Up In Oz

It is hard to explain how exciting and scary your child’s well visits can be during the first few months. On one hand you can’t wait to show off how cute your baby is, find out their new statistics and hear about all the wonderful milestones that should be occurring. At the same time you sit there with bated breath while the pediatrician silently checks out your baby and you just hope that he tells you how perfect she is and that you are doing everything right.

The Squish’s 2 month visit started off as normal. We found out she was in the 95th percentile for height and weight (no surprise there… her rolls have rolls), she smiled and chatted up the doctor as he looked her over and told us she was splendidly perfect. He checked her legs and hips like he always did and we began preparing ourselves for her the screaming fit that would ensue after her shots. Our pediatrician is a wonderful, caring and often verbose man, so in the midst of talking to us he began to check her hips again, thinking that he had forgotten to do it during her examination. All of the sudden he kept pushing on her left hip and moving it around. He looked at us and said “Do you hear that clicking? That’s not good.” He then began to rattle off about how she had a positive something or other and he suspected developmental hip dysplasia. Clint and I looked at each other completely shocked, he had JUST checked her out and everything looked fine.

We asked him to explain to us in English what he found and he told us that her left hip was clicking and he suspected it was out of socket. He said he was going to schedule her to go in for an ultrasound and if it was out socket she would need to be treated with a harness and should be good to go.

Still confused, we asked him to write everything down so we could go home and do some research. He told us not to worry until there was something to worry about and don’t read too much on the internet. Apparently, he has never met me before because I’m a Google fanatic. During the first few weeks of The Squish’s life I spent many hours of the day on the internet trying to learn how to take care of a newborn. I came up with a new diagnosis for “why she was crying” almost every day and I was constantly telling Clint about what new techniques we should use to calm her down.

I went home and began my internet research. The first site I went to was WebMD, I began to read a little bit about DDH and it didn’t sound too terrible until I got to the part about how it was treated. This was my first time to see the Pavlik Harness and to be quite honest, it looked horrible. I then went on to read about other forms of treatment and came across the Spica Cast. It was at this point that I realized this was a treatable, but fairly serious problem, and there was no fly by night fix.

Our pediatrician referred us to Texas Scottish Rite Hospital. They specialize in Pediatric Orthopedics and we are extremely blessed to have such a wonderful team of medical professionals taking care of The Squish. I will elaborate more on her excellent care at a later time.

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