chapter 1 the beginning

ok so i guess i need to put this out there..... so the story starts with marlee walking....we noticed that marlee had a pimp walk and we just assumed that she was already that cool. it bothered me though and we kinda chalked it up to bulky cloth diapers. well after watching her try to run and always stumbling around the place we decided that we should check her legs. mind you this has been over a coupla months. we check her leg and notice that one is shorter than the other and that is why she was struggling. well i took her to the dr for her bum and asked the dr "off the record" what he thought about her legs. he measured and appreciated what we saw. i wanted him to tell me that i was crazy and that is just the way she is. well not the case he said we need to go see a pediatric orthopedic surgeon ASAP. well we took the weekend to do some research and called all around about our insurance to make sure that we can be covered here before we went on the record with this. found out that with our insurance we are able to see any dr that we want as long as they accept BCBS. YAYYYYYYYY! what a relief. we thought we were going to have to fly back to FL and get a referral. ok during all this jeremy contacted a orthopedic surgeon that he used to work for and feels like he is the master of his trade. so the ortho said that she prolly has congenital hip dislocation/dypalysia and we need to see a dr asap. so we researched and talked to everyone we know to find a good dr here in boston. found out that childrens hospital in boston is the #1 hospital in the country for pediatric orthopedics! lucky us we are in a medical mecca here and should be able to get very good treatment. we have an appt on july 21 with a surgeon named samantha spencer at childrens and we will know more from there. as of right now we are trying to get xrays done sometime soon so that we will have all of our stuff together when we see the surgeon. that way we can get the help we need that day instead of waiting on tests. ok so more on hip dislocation.... the thing is the hip does not provide a big enough socket for the femur to fit in so it slides out of place or just stays out of place. IF this is the case then we will have to have surgery to correct the problem and she will be in casts for a min of 4-6 months to help her leg stay where they put it. this should have been caught at her 6 week check and every check up subsequent to date but it wasnt and we are extremely pissed and after we get our foot in the door at childrens we will be finding a new pedi. (i always had a feeling about him but didnt want to screw with our FL insurance by switching) now i know that i can................. we also researched the CHD and found out that marlee has 8 out of 10 of the symtoms, the other two can only be found with radiographic images. we are hoping that this is just a case of a shorter leg but we are treating it as CHD until we know for sure what is going on in her lower extremities. we have lots of things to worry about before the definate diagnosis(whatever is may be) comes in three weeks. i will try to keep you all posted as to what is happening with all of this. so stay tuned for the next chapter. *look ahead....Chapter 2: the x-rays* also let me know if anyone has any questions and feel free to pass this along to family and friends that would like to know what is up with the case Love and miss you allSamantha and Co.