I updated one of my very first posts, On Our Way Out of the Pavlik, with a follow up about Adam after one year without the Pavlik harness. It's funny how perspective works.
Adam was diagnosed with developmental dysplasia of the hip at 2 weeks old, and we were told to put him in a Pavlik harness for the first 3 months of his life, then to have him wear it while he slept for another month after that. Looking at him now, you would never, ever suspect that.
For Adam, the Pavlik harness worked 100% with no downside, and every hip x-ray Adam has had over the last year has shown that his hips look as if he had never had dysplasia in the first place. In fact, the harness in some ways helped him to build his abdominal muscles and legs, so when he came out of the harness at 3-4 months old, he was already ahead of the game with his physical development. He sat up at about the same time as other babies, he crawled at 7 months, pulled up to standing a week later, learned to climb at 9 months, took his first steps at 10 months, was full on walking the day before he turned 11 months, and was running at 13-14 months... with no issues.
Our experience with hip dysplasia, the doctors, and the harness, albeit stressful and scary, was positive.
The day Dr. Brown diagnosed Adam and put him in the harness, he told me that when it was all said and done I would look back and think how simple it was and how silly to be so upset. It was not offensive or unfeeling. He said it in a comforting and optimistic way and I believed him. But now, having gone through it, I don't know that I would say that's exactly how I felt a year ago or how I feel now.
The first 3-4 months were a blur. Being first time parents, we were learning so many new things about parenting, babies, daycare, and the normal stress that goes with it. We had extra stress tacked on, but we dealt with it not knowing that other parents have very different newborn months experiences. In the long scheme of things, 3 to 4 months is just a blip. Now Adam is 16 months old, so he wore the harness for a quarter of his life so far. But when they put the harness on him, it felt like it would be an eternity before they would take it off.
Now, when I look back, I do not think it was silly of me to be so upset - I wonder how I was not more upset and scared. But we lived day to day with so much to take care of that we simply didn't have the time to be wallowing in our stress and fear.
When I look back now, my emotions about those 3-4 months and the few follow up x-rays/check ups afterwards can be summed up with two words: perspective and gratefulness. While I found it traumatic two weeks (and longer) after giving birth, and I thought that I would never ever forget how hard and stressful the first months were, I now find that I don't think about it nearly as much as I expected I would. I look at Adam now and see a bubbly toddler with personality galore and so much athleticism that I completely forget that he even wore the Pavlik for the first few months of his life.
Of course, when you throw in the rest from this last year: terrible acid reflux, allergies that cause asthma-like symptoms, a million breathing treatments, a terrible early daycare experience (I think our second-best early parenting decision was to get him out of that school and into the one he's in now), pneumonia, RSV, and every other virus you could possibly think of ... you tend to change the way you think about life and focus on the good instead of the hard, stressful, or scary. So as I look back, I am amazed that what I believed was the hardest thing we'd have to deal with was actually, while not to diminish it's seriousness or "forget" my emotions about it, not the worst we have faced.
If I were to rank the events of the last year in order from scariest/hardest, I would actually rank it at 3 or 4. There have been times when Adam has been so sick that I've stood by the door with my keys in hand and had to make very difficult decisions about whether or not to go to the ER because he was breathing so badly (as many, many parents of babies and young children do everyday), or had an extremely high fever while on the road in the middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma because he had RSV. I would have to say that with a year's perspective, those moments were much more scary than having to change a diaper with a huge harness on your 3 month old baby. Perspective.
The hip dysplasia is a serious condition, of course, and definitely up there in our highlight reel of Adam's life, but for me to rank it so low in the standings today is a strange revelation.
I remember being jealous, constantly, of other parents who got to cuddle with their newborns during that cuddly stage without anything in between them. But would I trade the harness for those 3-4 months back? Absolutely not. I know that we did the right thing by following the orthopedic surgeon's suggestions. He told me that we could take the chance and see if his hips align themselves on their own (because many parents do make that choice), but that the harness was such an "easy" way to do everything in our power to help him get there, so why "wait and see" and then regret it if the situation didn't correct itself on it's own? The treatment options for babies much older or who's bones have already started to harden is much more difficult, invasive, and harder on the child. I have to say I agree with him. And I'm so thankful that the entire ordeal was so much more difficult on me than it was on Adam.
Maybe Adam's hips would have been fine without the harness, but I am so glad we didn't take that kind of chance, and I believe it paid off in the long run for him and for us. Not all parents and children in these situations have the same outcome, so for that I am grateful. I am grateful for our pediatrician, who caught it so early, I'm grateful for our pediatric orthopedic surgeon, who is intelligent, down to earth and caring (which I have found is very rare for any doctor), I'm grateful for my family and friends, who were supportive in exactly the right ways at exactly the right times, and I'm grateful we made it to where we are today.
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