Shelby's little houdini maneuver with the cast has me a bit unraveled! It was tricky to schedule the casting appointment and to get her daily therapies with 2 different OT's and 1 PT set up for the whole three weeks.
The cast went on last Thursday, and she was understandably grumpy and frustrated for the first 24 hours because she couldn't figure out how to sit herself up or commando crawl with her right hand constrained. But the cast did not hold her back for long, and she was moving around at full speed by Sunday. She also stopped fisting her left hand the first day and was using "lefty" to turn the pages in books by day 2.
She started fisting lefty again as soon as the cast was gone, but Trip said she could still turn the pages with that arm tonight. I hate it that some of what we have already accomplished has been reversed and that we have to start this inconvenient and frustrating process over again on Wednesday. Shelby certainly won this battle.
We learned the hard way too. That arm has to be casted with a bend or it will come off, cast at nearly 90 degrees. This angle will actually be more friendly to Shelby's crawling.
ReplyDeleteDon't be discouraged about lefty going back to it's old ways without the cast. It's only natural for that to happen to some degree. It did with us too. The important thing for us was to remember that the cast was forcing the brain to forge those crutial pathways so that the weaker arm was not completely disregarded by the brain, this makes for activating the use of that weaker arm less of a struggle later. It's all a process and with continued use, even long after CIT, it will get better.