The story of Mika's hips

I realised that if you're reading my updates on here about Mika's hips, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, since that is before I started blogging. So here is the story of Mika's hips:

On the day she was born she had a pediatrician come look at her, as is custom. He felt like her left hip was a little loose and ordered an ultrasound of her hips. The next morning she got the ultrasound and sure enough, it looked like hip displacia, so we got a referral to an pediatric orthopedic. Two weeks later, on August 20th, we had her first appointment. They looked over her ultrasound and decided to put her in this lovely thing called a pavlic.



Loads of fun, right? We had to go in once a week to get it adjusted for her growth. We had another ultrasound on her hips September 11th. We were fortunate to have a nice technician who said she would read the ultrasound and get it to our Dr for our 1pm appointment. (It normally takes about 4 days) Unfortunately, there wasn't much improvement, so she had to stay in it.

We had our third hip ultrasound on October 15th, and again they were gracious enough to read and get the results to our orthopedic by 1pm. There was only a 2% increase in the previous month. The orthopedic REALLY didn't like that, and as the next month went on got more and more concerned. She feels how her hips feel in the sockets every week, so she gets an idea of how they may be progressing, and she didn't think they were progressing very well. She told us that if the next ultrasound didn't show much improvement we'd have to probably do a body cast that held the legs in the right position. We started praying REALLY hard and asked everyone else to, too, at that!!!

Our fourth ultrasound was on November 13th. God totally preformed a miracle and her hips and about an 11% increase!!! We were so thrilled!! This meant she got to be out of the brace during the day. Now we'd only had to go down to part-time, meaning 12 hours a day. The orthopedic recommended at night and during naps, but gave us leniency to decide. We decided that since she slept 10 hours a night, we'd just do that. We didn't want to mess with putting her in and out of it during the day.

So for the next month we adjusted the pavlic ourselves and she was only in it at night!! By December 11th, she was out of it for good!!