She’s cleared for everything but the monkey bars now

Just had Ree’s last and final broken-arm checkup (from the accident on Aug 11 where she broke both bones in her left arm) and the orthopedic surgeon pronounced her healed, healthy, and ready for anything. Wooohoooo! Well anything but the monkey bars, that is. He was pretty frank when he said that monkeys bars send an incredible amount of business his way but he’ll never have a set in the backyard for his kids to play on.

Here’s the progress over the last few months:

I don’t have an xray of the arm right after the break and before they put the cast on, which is probably for the best anyhow. I have a vague and fuzzy recollection of someone taking me over to the machine and showing me an xray where one of Ree’s bones was broken and separated (there was a gap between the two halves) and the other bone was broken and one half was pushed over top of the other half so they were overlapping. Ugh. I stayed calm on the outside, but have to admit that I was freaking the hell out and really didn’t hear much after seeing that shocking xray.

Immediately after the successful closed reduction procedure (they knocked Ree out with anesthesia and manipulated the bones back into place) the arm looked pretty good:

Then the swelling went down and things shifted around, and here’s how the scans looked on Aug 30:

That side-view xray was the one that scared me and sent us scrambling for a second opinion. Can you blame me?

Anyhow, we got another xray and a second opinion on Sept 13:

It still looked bad to me, but the second doc said the exact same thing as the first “She’s young, she’s healthy, it’s healing as expected, no additional surgery (resetting/rebreaking) is recommended, in a year you won’t even be able to tell those bones were broken.” So I calmed down and hoped for the best.

And here are how things stand today. These two xrays were taken on Nov 28 and show remarkable improvement and a whole ton of new bone growth. The bone is filling in and returning to normal just like both doctors said it would. You can’t even imagine the magnitude of my sigh of relief after seeing these scans.

Ahhhhh, it’s all going to be ok... All told, Ree wore the neon pink full-arm cast from Aug 11-Sep 9 (4 weeks), the neon yellow lower-arm cast from Sep 9-Oct 1 (3 weeks), and then the black splint from Oct 1-Oct 22 (3 weeks). That’s 10 weeks of casts and splints right in the middle of summer. Ugh. Little sweetie never complained, just happily went about her business and didn’t slow down for a minute.

It’s a good thing Ree has been cleared for anything, by the way, because the girls were recently tested and promoted to a higher level in gymnastics where they’re on a developmental track that gets them ready for competition.