New Brace!

This morning we headed down to Shriners to get Kadence's new brace. We were a little worried because the last brace didn't come back the same pattern as she had chosen. We were HOPING that this time they would get it right. We woke up bright and early to head down to our 9am appointment. When I woke Shelby up she looked at me and said, "But mom, the sun is still down." I felt the same way. It was so hard to roll my sorry butt out of bed because it was cold out. We got out on time so we stopped to get free breakfast sandwiches at McDonalds....thank you Monopoly game pieces!

We got back to our room and before the girls could even unpack their backpacks of things to entertain them the orthopedist came in with the RIGHT brace! She was so excited and kept telling him "Thank you for getting the right one!" We got it adjusted and adjusted some more and then it was time to head to x-ray. Even though we had been there for more than two hours the girls behaved so well that I didn't even need to give them their new toy I purchased to distract from the long day. (AWESOME!) We got done with xrays at a little after 11 and weren't supposed to be to the clinic to see our Dr until 1:30. We knew there would be about 2 hours between appointments and just planned on eating lunch during that time. We lucked out because our orthopedist went and asked the Dr if he would just take us then. He said yes and I was so happy!

The Dr analyzed the brace, compare the new xrays to past xrays and then discussed everything with us. We expected for her curve to be a higher degree because of two reasons. First, she hasn't gone brace to brace ever and her back used to regress even while in a brace. Second, when she was molded for this new brace she was awake and it wasn't in traction. (They always mold her in traction, under anesthesia before they apply her new casts) In my head I had prepared to hear her curve went from 50 degrees up to 60 or so degrees. Imagine my delight when the Dr told us that her new brace is holding her at 47 degrees. WHAT?! That is so amazing! He then said that he doesn't think that there is any reason why we shouldn't continue going brace to brace. We will watch her curve with continued xrays to make sure she doesn't get drastically worse and if she does we would just apply a cast to re correct the curve. We will go back in 6 months to chat with the Dr in clinic and also to mold her for another brace. (Unless there is a problem and then we go in sooner) I am so happy that the decision we made was the right one and that things are going so well.

We headed back to orthopedics to give her brace a few more tweaks based on what the Dr wanted. I'm thrilled with one of the tweaks. She used to have a part of the brace that went pretty high on her back, but didn't really even touch her back. One of the pads puts it too far away so it didn't seem to do anything. I just figured I wasn't a dr and didn't understand what it was there for. The Dr said it wasn't doing anything and asked the orthopedist to cut it off. YAY! It makes it less noticeable that she even has a brace on and makes it so she can finally put her own shirt on.

We loved that things went better than we were planning on, the appointment was shorter than we planned for, and most importantly that Kadence LOVES her new brace and can't wait to show it to everyone.