Saturday, September 15, 2007

A fracture and a long night

We took Molly to the ortho yesterday morning and they took x-rays of her right lower leg. It looks like the fracture is at the very bottom of her tibia (close to the ankle). He made a splint and told us to come back on Tuesday to meet with her ortho. She was in good spirits on Saturday and we even got out of the house for a little while for lunch.

We tried to put her down for bed and things fell apart from there. We would rock her until she fell asleep, but as soon as we put her to bed she would wake up and cry until we picked her up. This went on for hours. Finally, we decided to let her stay up and read and play for a while. She was happy until we tried putting her to sleep again. I checked her for rashes, etc. and made sure we had given her as much pain medication as we could and I couldn't think of what else could be causing all of this trouble. I brought her downstairs at 6 and tried driving her around to fall asleep, but this also did not work.

Finally, I realized I needed to check her leg and took the splint off. She had big sores on the front of her ankle and her heal was all red and swollen. I had no idea that pressure sores could form so quickly. I felt terribly that I didn't figure this out earlier. We have had the splint off all day and she has been happy and crawling all around. She slept for an hour and a half in her crib for a nap and then came down and napped on me for another hour and half. The sores look better, but still look irritated. Hopefully a tonight will be better for Molly and will allow her sores time to heal.

She tried putting pressure on the sore leg, so we will have to see what the ortho says as far as how to protect the leg while it heals. My instinct says that she is good at self limiting and she probably doesn't need anything on it, but I would hate to be wrong and let her do things that injure it further and cause complications down the road.

Here's to a good night's sleep at the Sullivan's!

No comments: