Life sometimes puts us between a rock and a hard place and sends us problems on which we have to make a difficult decision, being positive and negative options in various aspects. When they only affect us it is easier to decide, but And when does it affect our children?
Something like this happened to a couple from Michigan, USA, whose daughter was born with what is known as proximal focal femoral deficiency and they had to choose between doing nothing and having to amputate his leg or save his limb 'fracturing it' up to 300 times in a painful maneuver for the girl.
What is proximal focal femoral deficiency
The proximal focal femoral deficiency It is a rare skeletal anomaly. It is estimated to affect 1 in 50,000 live births and is often diagnosed already during pregnancy. It can be bilateral, affecting both bones of the femur, and then it may take longer to diagnose, or unilateral, if it affects only one, whose difference makes it easier to realize the affectation.
What happens when a baby has a proximal focal femoral deficiency is that the femur of the affected limb does not grow what it should grow and then the leg does not reach the length that would be expected. This is what happened to the daughter of Jackie and Matt Moravek, who was born with the affected left leg and had to choose which path to follow.
Depending on the degree, the difference between one leg and another, the treatment can be limb amputation (if it is very short), the use of a prosthesis to match the leg with the other or the elongation by external fasteners.
These are the possibilities they were given, and they opted for the solution that would harm the girl more, but which better aesthetic and mobility results would offer her: the placement of external fixators to lengthen the bones gradually.
Eleven centimeters apart
The difference was not small, eleven centimeters, so the treatment was going to be long and tedious. They doubted a thousand times if it was the right decision, they wondered if they weren't being too cruel to their daughter, the love of their lives, your little one Elsie, but finally they decided that they wanted the best for her, and there was no doubt that although it was going to be hard for everyone, but especially for the girl, it was the best option.
Before starting the lengthening they intervened Elsie in a six-hour operation in which his knee, ankle and hip were rebuilt, to enable him to later walk in the best possible way.
In the same intervention, external fixators were placed through the girl's skin, attached to her bones and with a mechanism that would allow the tibia and femur to be lengthened from the outside, separating them.
The 300 'fractures'
I have quoted the word fractures because it sounds very beast to explain it this way, even though it really consists of something similar. Every day, three times a day, their parents had to manually activate the external mechanism to separate the femur from the tibia by up to one millimeter per day.
A bone, when it fractures, creates the so-called bone callus: new bone cells that join one end and another of the bone to repair it. Well, Elsie's parents had to do this continuously, separate the ends, leave a few hours for them to start joining, separate them again, let them come back together, and so on every day so that the bone never stops building. At the same time, the muscles did the same, as well as the skin and the rest of the limb structures.
This turned out very painful for the girl, who often cried with the maneuver, and therefore had to take painkillers continuously, to help her cope. The mother, Mrs. Moravek, explains it to the Huffington Post:
I felt very helpless. I was very satisfied with her progress but it was difficult to see her suffering and crying (...) The cleanliness of the open wounds, where the fixators that reached the bone were, was the worst. It was agony for her. I felt terrible about doing it without considering it, but we had a final goal in mind.
You will have to do it again later
Now, with four years, his legs are practically the same, although he has not finished everything. As it grows they will differentiate again and Elsie will have to undergo the same treatment again to match them again, when they stop growing, for when they calculate that they will have to match them again by about 10 centimeters. Cheer up Elsie!
Photos | DailyMail
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