Fun Friday- With Decubitus Ulcers on top

We try to make every Friday something that Tyler and Grayson can work toward. Usually it is a good activity like Bowling or swimming or some place or thing they have worked towards doing as a family. If he has days at school where he won't do anything or he yells ( turns out he yelled at his teacher and told her to shut up last week at school haha!) he doesn't get to do his fun Friday activity.

This last Friday we thought we would go swimming at a heated pool. He had to work for it. He almost lost it.... twice. And had I seen the paper that he yelled at his art teacher I would have said " Um no!!" but I didn't.

So after Shriner's Hospital we headed to the pool. We also picked the COLDEST day of the week to go but we had a good time. We took our neighbor friend, Sawyer. Grayson adores Sawyer and Tyler is a fish. He just goes and goes and does well in taking care of himself on the slides.

My sweet Grayson who just wanted to run and scream in his Paw Patrol Pants. 

Tyler and Sawyer. Ty was climbing back UP to the little slide.

Tyler soon decided that the regular slides were not enough for him so he asked to go down the big twisty slides. So him and his worker, Ciera, climbed up to the top 5 times and and he went down and LOVED it! The water was not overly warm but it was heated. But it was only 77 degrees outside. For us Arizona people, that is COLD!! We were super duper cold. Once Ty got cold his foot instantly turned in and he started walking on the top of it again. He was dragging it and just walking wrong. I carried him a bit, and Ciera carried him a bit. 

A side note about Ciera-


Ciara joined our little family over a year ago. We made a schedule with her that worked for all of us. And for some reason we have embraced having her here and we feed her for dinner and we do our night routine after we all have had dinner. So we sit as a family with her. She prayers with the boys, she eats the food. She helps with the boys and she is fabulous with Tyler. She climbed into the pool with him and cradled him around and just talked to him and did all that he wanted to do.

I feel truly overly blessed to have her working with our family. In fact, we have always been blessed. The last 2, Kelsey and Brynne we have LOVED them as well. Kelsey was just in a place she needed no  extra stress or hours and Brynne needed better and different hours. But for Ciera we work for her. We have hired some help for Ciera this summer but no one can take care of Tyler like Ciera can .

After we got home from the pool. Ty said that his foot hurt, but we got dinner going and did our dinner thing and didn't think much of it

Mother's day weekend came and Dallas asked me if I had seen his foot. I said I had not. I didn't look at it till Sunday and I freaked OUT!! His entire foot is open and back up to worse than what it was 2  weeks ago.

So that brings us to the Pressure sore.

When Tyler's feet got cold, he started dragging his foot and he peeled off a good chunk of his foot. So back to the podiatrist we went. we was really worried about it. But we went in and they opted to fix it with a laser treatment 4 times in the next ten days to get it to close faster. We do Antibiotic ointment and some bandages, after school we leave it open air so that it can harden up. His poor feet are truly the only thing he complains about.

This is the new sore. The Dry patch and the "spot" was the big one from yesterday's post!

So, this week we are praying that the wound heals fast for Tyler's foot. That we can do our best to keep it small enough that our surgery won't be postponed. 

I think we will keep our Fun Friday to bowling!

Lets talk about Pressure sores

I am a SENIOR at ASU here in Tempe. I am online so I am able to do most of my homework at night. I haven't done so bad considering all the stuff that goes on in our world. Just therapy alone takes up 3 days and appointments take up a few other days and a 3 year old takes up a lot more!

But my nights are filled with homework and reading and writing and rewriting.

After finals though, I can blog. Which I LOVE!


So tonight we are going to talk about Pressure sores. That is right decubitus ulcers.

The last few months ( OK maybe year)  we have been dealing with one on our foot. It stinks!

The curve of his cute deformed feet are actually a bony contracture and it causes pressure. The more we wait on his surgery the more contractors he will develop. But we have gone in to have this pressure sore looked at a few times and have been able to stay in office with our pediatrician. With surgery coming up, Dr. Emily ( the Ortho) needed clearance from our Pediatrician, neurologist and neurosurgery. We got 2 of the 3 super easy but needed a full check up with the pediatrician.

Dr. Carrol didn't love the look of our current pressure sore so he sent us to a local Podiatrist to have it taken care of. He said it would heal faster and that he might be able to get us a hard boot for Tyler to use so he wasn't walking on his foot. We didn't need the boot because we got our brace ordered from Bret ( the next post!!) and so we really just needed his sore taken care of.

In order to have surgery no open wounds can be on his body. So this was a big deal.

This is what his sore looked like the second day and before we saw the podiatrist:

This is what our pediatrician saw and this is what I saw and this is what makes me have anxiety. this is not OK.  Pressure sores can be so so bad. 

The podiatrist took a scalpel and literally shaved off the dead skin layer by layer until he got down to fresh skin. He showed me how to clean the edges every night, how to file it down and how to fix it so that we have little to no rubbing on a regular basis so that he can still wear a shoe and brace. Until we get his feet fixed I have a feeling ( even after) that this will be an on going issue.

At night we get out our "boo boo kit" and work really hard to do our best so that Tyler doesn't cry over his foot hurting. Ironically this is about the ONLY thing that he has continually talked about as hurting. It is really sad.

Me and Dr. Grayson gear up to take care of these feet.

And I get my gear on to not infect the wound- 

The pads are to keep pressure off, the band aid is so that Tyler will stop crying. I then make a magic spell up and put on magic socks to keep Tyler from pulling this stuff off. It rarely works but it is a start. 

Last week we got Tyler's foot clear! We were down to a PIN HOLE and we were down to using an emery board on his feet only. No edges were needing to be cut. Thursday we were discharged and we were to call if anything came up or we needed a shave in order to look even better.

Today.......... WE HAD TO CALL!!!!

To be continued.......................