Back to Back Issues

(Mirroring the recent post on Caring Bridge)
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/danieljmiller/journal 

Daniel was back to visit the orthopedist at Riley yesterday.  He's been having back pain around the area of the original spinal fractures for about a year and a half now and it's been growing considerably worse lately ... not so much worse pain, but more frequent.  Most every night and often during the day, he complains about his lower back being "achy". 

For nearly a year, his upper back has begun bothering him too.  Originally, I thought it was more about poor posture than anything else, but over the past several months, I've noticed that his his shoulder muscles (traps) are constantly in knots - usually rock hard.  Several people have mistaken them for bones where there shouldn't be any.  So I've been pushing to get someone to take this seriously again.  This was part of what actually led to the leukemia diagnosis, but everyone agrees the leukemia doesn't explain what's going on with his back.

So we finally got an appointment back with the bone doc but his X-rays came back "fine".  Pretty much what I figured he was gonna say. :-(((  So he's prescribed a new brace for Daniel to wear that is supposed to improve his posture and help take any pressure off the area of the fractures and the "hunching" of his shoulders.  In general that's a good thing.  But I'm not at all convinced that's actually going to fix anything.  We'll see.  Hopefully, just dad being "difficult" again w.r.t. the medical community. 

Luckily, Daniel's not tooooo upset about having to wear a brace again.  He actually came to rely pretty heavily upon the last one even though it ultimately ended up doing more harm than good because it was formed wrong and actually pushed him into an incorrect posture.  (Dad is still kicking himself for staying with that doctor much longer than his intuition told him to.  *Sigh*)  Pray for me!!  Better yet, pray for that osteopath if this doesn't produce some results pretty quickly!  ha ha. :)

Please continue to pray for poor Daniel too as this just adds ANOTHER "thing" to his life.  Osteopaths, orthopedics, oncologists, hematologists, lymphoblasts, and chemotherapy have no business in the vocabulary of a 10 year old little boy.

- Tim / Dad -