Clubfoot Club

Today I got welcomed into the clubfoot club...I had an ultrasound last week and while we could definitely see that it was a boy, we could not see one of his legs very clearly. So I was scheduled to have another ultrasound today to find that other leg. Ha, ha, what a joke, is what I thought. I couldn't get any extra ultrasounds when I was pregnant with Jacob, no matter how badly I wanted one, and then here they were handing me another one. I went this morning to do the ultrasound and the nurse/technician was doing her thing, checking out my baby and then she said with her wonderfully indecipherable accent, "ach, yas, ders da clubfoot" and then I saw her type on the screen "CLUBBED FOOT" with an arrow pointing to it. I let her go on for a few more seconds and then I said, "What? He does have a clubbed foot?" And then she printed me out a lovely little 4D ultrasound picture of my baby boy's inverted left foot. At my look of panic she said, "Oh don't worry,you know they can fix that don't you?" (like it's a cracked radiator and not a baby's foot) Really I knew nothing about club feet, so I just smiled and nodded and waited for the doctor to come explain it. So here, for all of you that are as uninformed as I am, the below picture is of an infant with two (bilateral) club feet. While the nurse told me that my baby had only one club foot, the doctor thought that both were actually clubbed, just the left one was more severe. I get to have more ultrasounds throughout the rest of my pregnancy to find out for sure. After my ultrasound I got to speak to a genetic counselor who was really wonderful and explained to me how this all works (whilst I balled): I think within a week or so after the baby is born he will have both legs (if it is bilateral) put into casts that go up to his thighs. These will be changed regularly (I think over a 6-8 week period) with his foot being manipulated each time into acloser-to-normal-position. Then he'll go through a minor surgery, then three more weeks of casts, and then he'll wear corrective braces, gradually reducing the amount of time he needs to wear them, until he's around four years old. I think that's it in a nutshell. And I think the amount of time for each step depends on the baby and on the doctor who is treating him. So I guess you could say that my day has been a whirlwind of emotions and my vision of the future has altered enough to prove to me yet again that Heavenly Father is in control, that he has a plan for me and Rus and our family, and that this baby is coming to us because Heavenly Father knows that we already love our baby boy and that we'll take care of him. Please keep our baby in your prayers, that he will be healthy and strong.

(I also want to mention that two typical effects of clubbed feet are a smaller shoe size and a skinnier calf on the leg of the affected foot. So my son will still have cankles like me, but at least his feet won't be huge. :) (Cankles, as my sister Amy calls my legs, are where ankle is kind of chubby so your calf basically runs into your ankle...)

If you want to learn more, here's a website that I found to be very informative: http://www.marchofdimes.com/professionals/14332_1211.asp

In my ultrasound, the baby's left foot looked like this baby's and you couldn't see the right foot very well because the left one was covering it up...