Leg Brace & Nutcracker

Two posts in one with this one.

Three Saturdays ago, Amelie woke up in a lot of pain. She cried out to me from bed, and said that her legs hurt. I thought that she was having growing pains, but then she was unable to walk. I thought maybe she'd get better over the course of the morning, but if anything, she seemed to get worse, so we got to urgent care at about 10:30. The doctor there manipulated her legs, which really hurt her, and wanted to send her to the hospital for x-rays and blood tests.

Long story short, we went home from the ER with a leg brace and instructions to get a wheelchair, since kids apparently can't use crutches very well until they're about 8 and she wasn't supposed to put any weight on it.

Aunt Holly, Amelie and I all had tickets to go see The Nutcracker ballet on Monday night. This is Amelie before we left:

And this is her when we got back, drinking cocoa. She loved it. After a particularly impressive bit of ballet (throwing the ballerina up in the air), she yelled out "Do it again!" I think next year, we can take James, too.

We couldn't get a follow-up with the pediatric orthopedic clinic until Wednesday, when we learned that she hadn't broken her kneecap after all. They said that she has a bipartite patella (so it just looked like a fracture, but really was always in two pieces) and probably had transient synovitis, which would explain her good spirits and how well she responded just to ibuprofen.

The school  wanted a release to normal activity, which they gave for the following Monday, but the receptionist wrote "fracture healed," which was not entirely accurate :)