So here we are:

On a journey a little bit different than yours, but maybe not, if you are someone reading this blog to find out what your journey might entail. Let me tell you, we have full days and quiet days, days where we don’t want to do anything and days where we have to convince our 3 year old that putting on her braces and standing for a few hours will be fun! Ever since our doctor mentioned that she was a candidate for SDR (spinal surgery) I was certain we would need to do this. She recommended we wait though, try medication like gabapentin and botox injections, work on her building up strength and her preference was to have this surgery after the age of 4. So we did wait, for the most part.

First, she recommended putting Ava on a daily medication and I was hesitant. How do you give a 2 year old a medication when they can’t communicate how it is making them feel? So we waited, a few months passed and on our next visit we agreed to try it out. I still didn’t feel 100% great about giving it to her but I also didn’t want to let my feelings about medication prevent her from some relief she might need. So we started it and stayed on it for almost 1 year. We told the doctor after about 8 months on it, that we weren’t sure if it was really helping. So she told us we were on a very low dose and could increase it. We discussed and decided taking it up a notch to see if it would have a positive would be better to do before completely weaning off of it. A weaning process, that right there tells you this is some serious stuff. So we stepped it up and we did not like what happened next.

They said it could cause moodiness and many other side effects, but what we saw was the moodiness. My once happy baby was crying at the drop of a hat. She became so upset and was inconsolable, it was horrible. So now this medication, that I didn’t want to start, but also didn’t want to deny her if it was the right thing to do, was changing her. We were done, we called the doctor’s office to let them know we would begin the weaning process and got that medication out of our lives.

Next, she recommended Botox. It took us a little bit of time to decide to go this path as well. It’s a toxin, the same question comes into my brain. How do I inject this into my child when I, personally, wouldn’t inject it into my body. Yes, it serves a medical purpose, but if it was your child, you would realize how hard of a decision it would be. So here we are, a few months of thinking it over, reading about other parents’ experiences on the FaceBook groups and deciding to move forward. The doctor was very nice and had a great approach, meaning she just wasn’t gungho to fill Ava up with Botox. She was reserved and wanted to do the right thing, so we got injections in her calves and her adductors.  We saw some relief in her adductors and her scissoring was not as strong, but it didn’t quite go away.  I couldn’t say if we would do it again and now that we are scheduled for SDR, I pray we won’t have to.