Extracting Little Fish from the chair for a few minutes, I got some comparison photos.
On the left, the chair which she has had for the past 15 months, supplied by our local wheelchair services. That isn't just a trick of perspective, the wheels on her NHS chair are indeed bigger than the whole of this new little Otto Bock Minny.
Not the lateral supports (admittedly not hugely supportive) which apparently "you can't fit to an active user chair or they will restrict movement".So where was Little Fish when I was taking these photos?
Busy multitasking in the bathroom. It's good to see her earning her keep.Sadly, just minutes after I had taken this photo she stopped mopping the floor and started drinking the water from the mop bucket.
Oh, and in other news, remember that blister?
After having several people look at it and go "hmmm" we think we have an explanation. It is a burn. This makes me feel physically sick. Somehow, Little Fish has burnt her foot. Due to the position of the blister, the most likely explanation is that her footplate got overhot in the sun, her heel came into contact with it, and fried. She has no feeling in her feet, nothing that would have alerted her or any of us to the fact until it was too late. I know she has no feeling in her legs; I'm doubly careful to check water temperatures, slather her with suncream, keep her away from the cooker and hot food. I never thought to check the temperature of her
Becca - we're definitely in the pop brigade, in fact there was a competition to see who got to do it. Our community nurse won in the end but only because she had the proper sterile kit plus a swab to check for nasties.
Tia
8 comments:
Awesome. Glad you got the foot sorted out.
Wow--can see why she is zooming all over the place!
Now the fun will begin - keeping up with her.
Glad you were able to get the blister figured out--
Don't beat yourself up over it--as we live and learn all the time with our kids.--I can imagine you'll be watching her footplates like a hawk all the time now.
Debra
What an awesome LITTLE chair. So glad she has one that really fits her!!
So glad you figured out about the blister. Poor baby.
Blessings from Costa Rica
ah perfect chair for her! i bet she loves it!
ugh on the foot...now you say its a burn it makes sense! but you wouldnt expect it like you say. Hope it heals quick
Rx
Wow that chair looks well nippy!
Don't beat yourself on the footplates. No matter how much you know, life throws you a curveball.
Beautiful little chair! I'm so pleased for Little Fish, it is very obviously a much more appropriate chair for her.
You can too have laterals on active user chairs, though - I did for years - I'd have had to start using a powerchair about 18 months sooner than I did, had my rehab techie not agreed to put a protech back on my active chair, anything else would've been unpushable. Decent low-profile ones won't significantly restrict movement and if you get swingaways she'll quickly learn to flip them out if she needs to lean over sideways to reach something.
Why does it look like her new footplate only has padding on one side, incidentally?
Makes good sense that the blister is a burn - and I can well appreciate what that will mean to you - but it truly is Just One Of Those Things, I doubt the first and certainly not the last accidental injury that LF is going to collect that might-just-theoretically have been preventable.
I've been meaning to say this for a bit, mostly 'cos I reckon that the hospitally child-dev IQ type people don't usually come up with this stuff, but someone who at only-just-three years old has mastered driving a powerchair and is nimble and well-balanced enough even in a brand new manual to do wheelies &c is clearly well set up to face whatever the world may throw at her. She'll read and write, take GCSEs, possibly A levels if she really takes to the right subjects, and I've no doubt at all that eyesight allowing she'll learn to drive.
Thanks for that, Becca, it means a lot.
She's got padding only on one side of her footplates because one leg is shorter than the other - her left hip is dislocated. We're still waiting for the surgeons to decide what to do about that - they don't want to do any kind of pinning and osteotomying apparently because with her lack of muscle tone the hip will just fall out of the socket again anyway. So we're waiting (and waiting - been waiting since January) for them to do an arthrogram, decide what if anything can be done, and then find a time to do it. Meanwhile her right hip is also dislocating but it's dislocating forwards, so her right leg gets longer as her left leg gets shorter (and then they tell me she has scoliosis; hmm I wonder how that happened?).
This is why I wanted a moulded seat - I thought that if we accommodated the assymetry and stabilised her pelvis that her spine might be supported in a straighter position. But the standard custom fit chair here is a FoamKarve - absolutely perfect for Mog; she lives in hers and hasn't had a single pressure mark ever despite sleeping in it all night as well as sitting in it most of the day when she's poorly. It's too bulky for Little Fish though - she wouldn't be able to reach over the sides of it to push her chair. They were considering just doing an older style polystyrene mould but apparently she's too small for that - and definitely too small for a Lynx or matrix style seat. The pad is a compromise; it does at least mean that neither foot is left hanging in the wind.
It occurs to me that the shorter answer would have been "because her legs are different lengths" - bet you wish you hadn't asked now!
Tia
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