Day 4: A New Arm and Exhaustion

I'm in the Dallas Airport right now... Jordan is running around in a kids' play area. She's the littlest one here, but she doesn't seem to mind.

We had Jordan's new prosthetic for about two hours before we needed to head to the airport. Occupational therapy wasn't extraordinarily helpful since Jordan was spent from all of her hard work yesterday. But we got some great tips and the therapist typed up a bunch of tips and ideas on ways to get Jordan using two "hands." The big bummer was during therapy we got a little bit of pink marker on Jordan's new glove on her prosthetic. So the hand is already dirty! I'm pretty bummed about that. Hopefully it will wear down and won't be as noticeable.

Before we left, one of our former students/reporters came by to interview Jordan and I and the folks who worked with my girl. He's working on a story about her and Pediatric Prosthetics Inc. for KTRH - a commercial news radio station in Houston. He even ran to the airport to catch some sound with us there.

So we've survived the first flight -- it wasn't much fun. The girl is EXHAUSTED and she wanted more freedom during the flight. But I hope running around at the Dallas airport will help her take a great nap

***UPDATE****
We're home... We're exhausted. Jordan was fantastic on the second flight. When we were getting close to landing, I started rocking her a little and humming a song. She grabbed her baby, wrapped her baby with the blanket that is now named "Night Night" and started rocking the baby and singing the baby song: "Baby, baby, baby, baby." When the song was over (and it was 2 minutes long), Jordan started clapping and saying "yay!!" Apparently she was very proud of her song.

She slept in the car once I pulled over and placed "Night Night" on her appropriately. She was screaming her blanket's name until I had to pull over and fix it. Geez, this girl knows what she wants.

I'll post a little bit of video of Jordan's therapy tomorrow. I'm fried from all of the travel and driving.

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).

Day 2 evening in review

We're ready to go today... But things don't really start rolling until this afternoon so we're going shopping for shoes.

In the meantime, I wanted to show you a highlight of last night:

Silly me... I forgot my camera. Can you believe... Me? So the iPhone had to do in low light -- so it was tough to catch the kids playing in a sandbox.

It was so cool to hang out with them. Jordan gave her friend a big hug and kiss... I think it surprised her. It surprised the rest of us because it wasn't prompted!

By the way, this is what Jordan's prosthetic looked like when we left yesterday. By the time we get in this afternoon, it should be ready to go! Excitement. There's more to come!

Day 2: Getting Things to Work

We slept a TON last night. Jordan was so well rested that she popped out of her pack and play and squealed HI!!! to me this morning. I figured that meant she was ready for business today. We worked with two different test sockets, watched a lot of Elmo and finally got Jordan into the mood to really work on using her muscles so we could find a good site where she can learn to open and close her "hand" on command.

It's all about getting this sensor to feel muscle movement -- and the hard part is finding a muscle Jordan can move on command that is strong enough to trigger the sensor. I hope (knock on wood) that we found one today. It's actually the muscle she uses that bunches up her arm at the base -- Something we were able to get her to do on many different motions, especially when she moved around, picked things up and often when we asked her to wiggle her fingers.

Jordan is napping now and we hope to get her back with a possible arm that's ready for her. It will probably be ready by tomorrow since it took us so long to get a good test socket and sensor site. Either way, tonight we get to hang out with a family of a little girl who is two months older than Jordan. They met last year and I can't wait to see them again!

Day 1: Getting Started on a New Prosthetic

We got up crazy early this morning (even though Jordan seemed quite alright about it at the time - that picture shows her bright and cheery in the car around 6am) and headed out to Houston. The combination of morning traffic in St. Louis and a 20 minute layover in Dallas was enough stress for the day. But I knew how things work with prosthetic building. When we got here, they got right to business with trying to locate a sensor site on Jordan's arm to help trigger the hand. We also had to get Jordan casted. Boy was all of that UGLY.