Home Again, Home Again :)

Hooray! We are home after a long day of travel and are looking forward to a good night's sleep.

Molly was up off and on all night last night, so the 3 of us got very little sleep. I think she is starting to feel better and is not liking having the splints on that are limiting her movement.

She went to bed early tonight, but has already woken up half a dozen times crying, so it might be another long night. We are hoping she just needs to get back into a regular routine and then things will be smoother during the night.

We can't say enough good things about our experience at Children's Hospital in Omaha. The staff was amazing. Dr. Esposito is such wonderful man and did a phenomenal job on Molly's surgery. I feel so fortunate to have someone like Dr. Esposito as a part of Molly's care. He is very good at what he does and clearly cares a great deal about his patients. He really seemed to enjoy spending time with Molly and even wanted us to send a picture of her to him. What a difference a good doctor makes.

If you have a child with OI and are reading this blog, I would like to encourage you to make a trip to Omaha if you can find a way for your insurance to pay for it. I assure you that it is worth the battle. We have been to a lot of doctors in the past year and hands-down, Dr. Plotkin and Dr. Esposito are two of the most amazing doctors we have had the privilege of meeting.

We briefly met with Dr. Plotkin yesterday morning to touch base about Molly's infusions and are going to work on doing them at home. This would be a huge improvement over spending the night in the hospital!

I'm not sure I have documented exactly what they did in surgery and thought it would be good to jot down while it is still fresh...

He started with her right femur (the more bowed of her femurs). He used an F-D rod, which is a telescoping (or growing) rod. He had to make 3 osteotomies (breaks) in her femur in order to insert the rod properly.

He then went on to her Tibia and inserted a "wire" (thin rod) in through the top of her Tibia made 2 osteotomies (breaks) and removed a portion of the most bowed part of the bone.

He then did the same to her left leg, but with fewer osteotomies in the femur.

She has bandages on the incision sites and will have those on for another 9 days. She has splints that go up the side of her leg and are held on with Ace bandages. She will need to keep these on for another 4 weeks. We will take the splints off a couple of times a day and do very small movement of her leg and foot to keep things from getting too tight. We have been told that as the kids start to feel better they will start to move around with the splints still on.

I'm sure that it will be a matter of days before Molly is trying to get around on her own. We are going to try putting her on her belly with the splints on in the next couple of days, it will be interesting to see how that goes, I don't know what to expect.