12 Weeks Old! A day of learning.

So I met with our new pediatric physical therapist today. I learned so much about some of the ways Jordan’s little arm has affected her. First, she holds her shoulders high… So I need to help her relax and put her shoulders lower. She also curves her body to the right when she lays down. You can kind of see it in this picture that I took of her yesterday. So I need to help her center her torso out. Also, there are certain ranges in motion that she is not strong at doing — like reaching out and up. She has some very strong motions, but there is work to be done. We’re going to need to mock up something that encourages her to move her arm out to make something move. I’m planning to consult our resident MacGuyver in the family when he comes to visit for Cam’s birthday.

I feel like I’ve started working with someone who is not intimidated by Jordan’s rare amputation. She is planning to meet with us in 2 weeks and she plans to go with us when we meet with our PM&R doctor. That’s when we’re going to (hopefully) prescribe Jordan’s first prosthetic.

The physcial therapist said she is thinking a 90 degree angle arm is something Jordan really needs before she can sit up on her own. With the arm at that angle, Jordan can wear it through the day and not have to take it off when she’s not heavily supervised. At that angle, she can have something to look at when she looks over to the left… And she can roll over onto her belly without any problem with the arm already in a tummy time angle. When she starts sitting up on her own, we would move to a passive arm that curves. That’s a lot of prosthetics in a year… And convincing our health insurance will be interesting. But I really don’t care about that. We’ll figure it out.

As for yesterday… We spent a good amount of time with an occupational therapist who appears to be really intersted in coming up with good ideas for Jordan. She took scraps of items from a hand clinic and put together this little arm tool for Jordan. I think that’s really cool.

Of course today, Jordan expelled so much energy with the physical therapist, she’s still sleeping (3 hours at this point). When she gets up, we’ll work on the arm and some of the exercises we’ve talked about in OT and PT. It’s kind of overwhelming when you think about all the little things we need to work on.