That Explains A Lot

We went to see the pediatric orthopedist today...Dr. Quatro (pictured right), about Amanda's elbow. She examined Amanda and took a ton of x-rays. She concurred that Amanda's elbow was indeed out of socket. Due to the fact that it came out of socket a second time, she said she thought there might be some cartilage or a bone fragment in the socket that kept it from going back into place properly. This would account for its tendency to pop out of socket so easily the second time. She wanted to line up surgery for Wednesday with the game plan being: put Amanda out with anesthesia at the outpatient clinic, try to reduce the elbow (put it back in place), try to pop it back out of place (to see if it was too easy), cut into the elbow if necessary, clean out the joint and reduce the elbow. Treatment would include a split or a hard cast.

Dr. Quatro mentioned she would really like to see the x-rays of the previous dislocation and the x-rays the hospital looked at the second time, but she could not read the CD the x-rays were on. The x-ray CDs came from the hospital. When we saw the first orthopedist, he just popped the CD into his computer and the CD loaded a program to view the x-rays. Since they gave us the x-ray CDs to take to Dr. Quatro, I popped them into my laptop last night and looked at them. Pretty cool! That is also where I got the x-ray for yesterday's post.

I told Dr. Quatro I had gotten the CD to open on my laptop, so she invited me to try it on hers. The CD did not auto-open, but I was able to open it by going to My Computer, right-click on the CD, select Explore and then double-click the program that is on the CD. It opened and she could view the CD.

Dr. Quatro said she could not tell anything from the initial x-ray (elbow x-rays are read more easily when the elbow is bent at a 90 degree angle, but when it is dislocated, that cannot happen). Almost as soon as she saw the x-ray of Amanda's elbow after it had been reduced and put in a splint the first time, she said, "Oh yeah, there's the problem. That never reset correctly. There is something in there."

That statement made me feel better. First of all, the doctor's "educated guess" that she had shared with us earlier based on her experience and having never seen the x-ray was proven correct (she was a good doctor). Secondly, I felt better knowing that the doctor had an idea what to expect and game plan to fix the problem. The x-ray also explained a lot as to why Amanda's elbow popped out of joint so easily (it was not my fault for taking her for a bike ride!) and it gave us a little more assurance that is should not be a problem in the future.