Setting the baseline…

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to write this post.

The first is because many of you either haven’t met Elijah, or you haven’t seen him recently enough to notice the physical effects of his dysplasia.

The second is because I hope that this can set a visual baseline. In the future, when he’s all healed, how much better will his legs work? That’s a question we don’t know the exact answer to. When we take a video at that point in time, I hope that the changes will be noticeable. 

In the video, I have Elijah do a few things. I have him walk back and forth a few times, changing his speed from a slow walk and getting faster until he runs. You should be able to see his “waddle.” This is one of the most noticeable aspects of his dysplasia, and is actually one of the expected (or at least known) symptoms of the dysplasia. I assume most people notice this, though most don’t say anything. It doesn’t bother us when people do comment about it. It usually just leads to a conversation about why he does it. The next thing I ask him to do is to sit cross-legged. As you can see, his knees stick almost straight up. When he was in Karate class, instructors would try and push down his knees, thinking he was sitting like that on purpose. When his knees wouldn’t go down any further, and he winced in pain, they would stop, and then after class I’d usually have a conversation explaining to them why he couldn’t put his knees down. You can also see later in the video that I ask him to perform a side-kick. This might not be too easy to see in the video as he was getting a bit close to me and the camera, but what it meant to show was his inability to actually lift his legs up to the side. His side-kicks would usually be him kicking somewhat behind him, or just kicking at an angle toward the ground. Now, he’s never going to be chuck norris, but maybe he’ll be able to get his legs a bit higher. The other thing you’ll see in the video is me asking him to lay on his back and to spread his legs as far as he can. This doesn’t really need any explanation, he just can’t really spread them too far before they just stop.

Now, in normal daily life, he can do most of the things he wants to, but there are times when these issues limit him. It’s usually something random, like trying to give him a piggyback ride, which he can’t do because he can’t spread his legs open far enough. Or it might be him trying to step over something tall, or maneuver in a certain way. He’ll figure out a way to do it, or to work around it, but it’s at those times we’re reminded that it does affect him.

Alright, I’m starting to get off-track. Back to the reason for this post.

For those of you who haven’t seen him or seen him in a while, this can help you understand what we were seeing that caused us to be concerned.

And when I take that future video asking him to do the same things, hopefully we’ll all see a difference.

We don’t expect this to make his hips perfect, or for him to become an olympic gymnast, but it would be nice to give him a piggyback ride, or for him to be able to move a bit better, like most other kids.

We’ll all see how it works out, together.