Session Twenty-Four: Making the Crooked Places Straight, Part Five
After a rocky start to our scoliosis journey, we were about to receive some exciting news…
First, we wouldn’t have to log as many miles to Travel with our Trachie for the next cast. The plan was to have casts 2 through 4 put on at the Children’s hospital in our own state (still a 400-mile roundtrip), then we were set to return to Nemours in Wilmington, DE on the one-year anniversary of beginning scoliosis treatment for cast number 5 and a reevaluation.
But the best news was that the orthopedic doctor at the Ohio hospital employed a different casting technique for scoliosis correction. His casting method wouldn’t go all the way up to our daughter's armpits, and the best part… he used a waterproof cast! Yippee!!! Our girl could still take a bath. I mean seriously, think about it… can you imagine have to sponge bath your child every day for years on end? It was only actually six weeks that our daughter was in the cast before we had to cut off due to a respiratory illness, but we anticipated the casting lifestyle would become our new normal for years to come. It was quite an ordeal to wash our daughter’s long hair without getting the cast wet, we had to get pretty creative. For this medical momma, a waterproof cast was the best news ever.
Cast #s 2,3, and 4 were put on under sedation every three months without any issues. An x-ray was taken with cast #3 and though it wasn’t as great of a correction as she had achieved with the more invasive first cast, we felt that the convenience of this casting method outweighed the curvature correction. Our life was rolling on and the cast around our daughter’s torso really hadn’t resulted in the daily life upheaval we had feared.
We opted to cut her cast off early that summer after spending eight months straight in a cast. We were embarking on a really exciting adventure that summer as we would road trip all the way from Ohio to Big Sur, California in an RV for a family wedding. In an effort to make all the time in a car seat more comfortable for our daughter, we decided to give her a one-month reprieve before she was recasted just prior to starting first grade.
(You can read about our amazing adventure in the Travels with Our Trachie blog…just look for the 2022 Schwieterman Summer Adventure Series).
We noticed when we cut the cast off that her scoliosis curve was looking a bit like an upside-down question mark. Was it possible that her spine had drastically worsened while in cast #4? Yes, we would soon find out that the answer was yes, our daughter’s spinal health was deteriorating. We were about to have a very difficult conversation with the orthopedic surgeon…
Join us next time as we Travel with Our Trachie back to Nemours hospital in Wilmington, DE
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