Happy New Year everyone! Sorry I have been so bad about my postings, but one of my New Years Resolutions is to make the time for this so hopefully I will be a lot better about it. I am going to try to be as accurate as possible about this one, but I must admit I am not great with details about the beginning because I never thought any of it would lead us down this path, but here goes nothing:
1) March 2008 - Reagan was born in TX a happy, healthy 8lb 10oz baby girl, our first
2) Very few Dr's apts except the regular check ups and shots all babies get, she was so healthy
3) April 2010 - Reagan's 2 year well check with the pediatrition, all, ok, he said she looked very healthy (in my head I remember thinking of course she is, this kid is never sick, not even a cold or anything, she is like the perfect child)
4) Beginning of May 2010 - Reagan starts to limp when she is tired or being silly, I don't think much about it as she doesn't complain of any pain, there is no swelling and nothing is red, I am thinking that she is just goofing around or something
5) Middle of May 2010 - Reagan is still limping, I am still not too worried about it, but my Mother-in-law starts to plant a little concern in my head after telling me a few of the things she thinks could cause something like that (I will be eternally grateful for her for that)
6) May 15th 2010 - We go to one of Reagan's friend's birthday parties at a bouncy house place. Reagan is having a great time running and jumping and full of energy like always, she is just limping while she does it
7) May 19th 2010 - I finally break down and decide to take Reagan to the Dr to look at her leg. Our pediatrition's office told us that a clinic close to us has an X-ray machine and to take her there. So we go there and of course they don't have one, but we see the Dr there and she watches Reagan walk and says hum, she is definitly liping but didn't know why. She had no swelling in the legs, no redness, no pain to the touch, she was just limping. So they sent us over to the hospital to run some bloodwork (testing for anything abnormal, they said cancer, artiritis, etc) and take X-rays. So we go do that then leave quickly as my brother was in town celebrating his 30th birthday so we ran to dinner to be with him and the family. While there we receive a call from the clinic saying everything looks great with her bloodwork and her X-rays so we should take her back to our pediatrition as soon as possible so he could see if he had any other ideas. About 30 mins after that we received a call from the hospital asking for us to come back and do more X-rays. So Reagan and I left dinner and went back to take more X-rays. They took about 5 more and then about 4 people walked into our X-Ray room, the first thought that went through my head was oh no, they are going to take her from me for some reason. No one did that but they said that she had a broken left tibia and that I needed to call a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and get her casted. I was absolutely shocked to hear this news, after all she had been running around limping for almost 2 weeks, not complaining of any pain or changing the way she did anything. Despite my speculation on the diagnosis, by this time I was feeling horrible for letting my daughter run around on her "broken leg" for 2 weeks so I was willing to do anything to make her better. Looking back, I think part of it was also a relief hearing that it was a broken leg and nothing worse like arthritis or cancer like they were also testing for. Overall the broken leg diagnosis was not horrible news, something we could for sure deal with, and something that could be "fixed" and not cause any long term effects for her.
I sometimes beat myself up for just accepting that now. That put us about 4-6 weeks back from finding the correct diagnosis, I guess I was just hopeful at that point, and couldn't believe, or didn't want to believe that something else, something much more detrimental than a broken leg was actually going on with her. I remember going home that night and telling my family it is a broken leg. I had the X-rays in my hand and we all looked at them and couldn't see anything. I know that I am not a Dr, but I did go to school, I thought that I would be able to see from an X-ray when something was broken. My family also couldn't believe it because she was running around and all of a sudden we are telling her to stop until we can get a cast on her leg. We were all wondering what was going on, and as I will speak more about later I did question the fracture, but more on that tomorrow.
My take away from this beginning of this process should have been to question everything and don't blow any abnormal behavior off, but who am I to question Dr's who do things like this for a living? I am just her Mom, what do I know? But I have found out over the past few months that I know the most about her and my gut feelings have usually been right. As parents we are the ones who know our kids and interact with them on a daily basis, we know them best. A smart Dr will ask the parents about the childs behavior, and if they really listen they will learn a lot from that. I know now that I must never be afraid to question anything and stick up for what I think, because in the end it is going to be Reagan that benefits, even if that makes me look bad in the process it is TOTALLY worth it!
Tomorrow I will continue our journey, sorry to break this up but WAY too much information to write down all at once!
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