Ted The Search For A Surgeon Who Could Lengthen My Leg
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ted the search for a surgeon who could lengthen my leg. After extensive research I found a surgeon who could operate with a low probability of complications. I was excited to alleviate my discomfort, but did not realize how long the complete process would take. In January 2005, I had my femur rebroken, a metal rod put into my bone, with four pins protruding from my thigh and attached to a large monolateral external fixator. I used a mini L-wrench to crank my femur apart four times a day for fifty days. In the end, my right femur had “grown” two inches. The process was concluded a year later with my final surgery when I finally had the rod removed.
Along the way I focused on my good fortune in finding a doctor who could help me and on how…show more content… It was clumsy and awkward but I knew it was important to give her my attention as the nurses were running back and forth between patients. We sat and sang together, or rather I sang and she babbled. I was just getting comfortable when her feeding machine beeped signaling completion. During my time at Maryville, I played video games with a pre-teen with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, read books to a toddler with short bowel syndrome, and massaged Vaseline into the thickened skin of a baby with harlequin ichthyosis. I watched as a 23-month-old boy who spent most of his life attached to a ventilator began learning to walk and gaining the same independence his peers developed so naturally many months earlier.
One day a five-year-old girl returned to the center with her mom. The nurses told me that she had been a patient a few years earlier. She spent the first two years of her life cooped up within the four walls of the healthcare center until she was well enough for her parents to manage her care at home. Looking at her in that moment it was hard to imagine. She was adorable and shy clinging onto her mom. Most of all just really normal. Her mom shared with the staff how her daughter was nearly ready to begin kindergarten in a public school.
I broke my femur in the seventh grade and my leg was set in a unilateral hip spica cast. That was just the beginning of a journey through numerous operating rooms, doctor’s offices, and X-ray machines. As a result of how I healed, my