As everyone always says, “So what’s the deal with her hips again?” here is an explanation. I know, I know, you didn’t come here to learn, but bear with me.
Savannah has bilateral, congenital, hip dysplasia. At the checkup in the hospital right after they are born, the pediatrician does a check of the baby’s hips by flexing them in their sockets. When our ped did the check up, Savannah’s right hip clunked out of the socket. It didn’t hurt her, but was a problem we needed to get checked out by an orthopedic doctor.
We had an ultrasound performed on her at 5 weeks (lots of times kids have them done earlier) and it was found that Savannah’s hip ‘ball’ was too shallow in it’s socket. At she grew this would have meant that the hip socket wouldn’t have developed normally (it would have been flat, instead of a nice round circle). She would have had some trouble walking and doing fun kid stuff like running and jumping and eventually would have had pain and a double hip replacement sometime in her 40’s. Yikes!
So we had her put in a Pavlik harness which correctly positioned her legs and hips for optimal growing. She responded beautifully to the harness (almost 90% of kids do) and was out of it in six weeks. There are lots of angles and ratios of the hip relative to the socket involved – I won’t bore you with that part.
Why did Savannah have this problem? Well, she had pretty much every risk factor there is. Hip Dysplasia typically affect girls (I think it’s like 1 in 300 live births v. 1 in 1200 for boys), the first born child, breech babies (which Savannah wasn’t), large babies (Savannah was 22 inches at birth) and children with a family history of hip problems. Gaga B had undiagnosed hip dysplasia and had a hip replacement some time in her 40’s. It also mostly affects Caucasian and Asian kids, with a high skewing of towards kids of Irish, English and Scottish descent. Basically, the poor kid didn’t stand a chance.
Savannah’s last checkup went pretty well, but there were a few things the doctor wanted to monitor. Savannah has asymmetrical thigh creases, which can be nothing, but can mean that her hips are out of alignment. I have been obsessing over these thigh folds for the last six months.
I also was really missing our ortho doctor in Seattle. He was so wonderful and was so good at explaining things and reassuring us. He was also spectacular with Savannah. Our new doctor is very nice, but I had a high bar set and felt like he didn’t really ‘know’ us. He is really a very nice man.
We showed up for our appointment and the staff was WONDERFUL! The X-Ray tech let Savannah push the buttons to turn on the machine and made shadow puppets and then gave her TWO stickers when they were done. There was some crying involved, but not much.
Then we waited for the X-Rays. It was a very nerve-wracking 10 minutes waiting for them to be ready.
The PA popped in and put them up on the computer and said that they couldn’t look more fabulous, but she had to have the surgeon come in and double check them. She jiggled Savannah’s (and Frank the Frog’s) legs around to make sure there wasn’t any clicking.
We were all very proud of Frank – he was really brave and was an excellent role model for Savannah.
The doctor came in and also said everything looked great. The word ‘perfect’ was bandied about and he told us not to come back for two more years! That should be her final checkup with regard to her hips.
It was one of the best days ever, so we went for ice cream.
