Whitmans Story Part I: A bit about Whitman: He was born on September 18, 2000 after a normal, healthy pregnancy. He showed up on his due date and was a very happy baby. He was joined over the next two years by two sisters- Bronwyn and Betty Jo. He has always been a great big brother. He loves his sisters and he loves to tease his sisters. :-) He met all his milestones on time or a wee bit late, except talking. He eventually did speech therapy which helped overcome that problem. When he started walking, we noticed that he tended to toe-walk. I brought this to the attention of his pediatrician and she referred us to an orthopedic surgeon at the Elks. Whit was diagnosed with short heel cords, which basically means that his Achilles tendons are shorter and about 2x thicker than normal. One of his legs was also a bit longer than the other. He had corrective heel-lengthening surgery on his left leg the summer of 2007. He was in a cast for 6 weeks and when he got it off, life went back to normal. Over the next few years, we noticed that Whitman’s gait when he walked was getting more and more awkward. He looked like he was limping and his arms would flail with him trying to keep his balance. We started by getting a lift put in the shoe of the leg that was shorter and that helped a bit. I started seeing that his body looked ‘not quite right’ in the way he was growing, but every time I would point this out to doctors, they said he was within the range of normal. In the fall of 2012, we went to the zoo as a family and parked a ways off to enjoy a walk on a gorgeous autumn day. Whitman was having more trouble than usual keeping up with us and we were all getting frustrated. He ended up in tears, crying out as to why he was this way. Wes went and got the car and Whit sat in the car instead of going into the zoo with us. He just wanted to be alone and my heart was breaking. We decided that we had put off finding answers for long enough and we made the determination to find out what was going on. At that point, we still thought it was the heel cord/leg-length discrepancy that was causing the trouble. I took him to the doctor for a physical and again was told that nothing looked wrong. This time, I was not going to let that be the end of it. I called Shriners down in Salt Lake City and made an appointment.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 04:30:49 +0000
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