Day 3: My Girl is a Trooper

The day started out calmly. I got to take Jordan to the store to get her new shoes that would fit. We found a Stride Rite that was really close to the prosthetic office and found these cute little diddies. Then I went to Payless to find some black shoes that I think will work for the holidays -- they probably won't be as comfortable, but Jordan did fit in them with her little inserts. Apparently the t-strap is a good option for her feet. Most of the day, Jordan would stop and show offer her shoes to anyone who asked or didn't ask.

After an early afternoon nap, Jordan got to try on her new prosthetic. It seems to go pretty well, but not long after she started wearing it, we could see it wasn't holding up on her arm properly. It was the same problem we had before: Her arm would droop and the prosthetic wouldn't sit, it kind of fell off a little. We really don't want to do that again. This trip had two goals for this arm: 1) Get the sensor in a spot where Jordan can purposefully open and close the hand and 2) Find a way to get this arm to fit better so Jordan doesn't hold her shoulder strangely. There was a little time to tweak and poke at the girl, but an occupational therapist who works with the prosthetic company came to work with Jordan so there wasn't a ton of time to fix the problem. During the short evaluation and therapy, Jordan was doing something very cool: Holding bubbles with her "hand" and trying to blow. In the end, she was more interested in rubbing the bubbles on her belly.

Before therapy time was over, the prosthetic was off and our prosthetists were trying to figure out what was going wrong. The therapist had to leave around 3:30 and from then on, we tried and tried to figure out what was going wrong with Jordan's prosthetic. Six hours later, I was able to get Jordan back to her bed for a night's sleep. It was a long, long evening. It's even longer for our prosthetists... They're still at work building it.

Why you ask? Well, we had to recast Jordan's arm and they had to rebuild the socket so it will fit on Jordan's arm better. The best option is getting her into the arm using a think nylon sleeve. It pulls her arm in and it keeps things loose enough to help her get her arm out. She's complicated and it was hard to stay positive while Jordan was tinkered and tinkered and tinkered with. She is amazing. She really did a good job tolerating most of it. Casting is horrible, but other than that, she put up with a lot of crap. I won't have time to put a video together tomorrow (The day starts at 9:30am with therapy using a prosthetic that I hope is ready by then and we won't get home from the airport until 11pm or so).