Saturday 12 May 2012

A Check up 8th April 2012

....As always it's a stressful day, making sure we have everything to take with us. The trip itself into London is only a half hour drive, but still, it's a pain! This time was made worse because RLH now has a whole new hospital, located next to the old building, but for a first time, not knowing how to get into it etc made things worse...

....When we arrived at the hospital, spoke to an ambulance near by to ask how to get into the building, we found a very nice clean building, but without the knowledge of which lift to go for as each lift takes you to different parts of the hospital, after about 20 minutes of not knowing how to use the lift and Alan going and asking different members of staff we eventually found we needed, lift core 9 - that would take us to outpatients on the 7th floor. Knowing what lift we needed was great, it was then operating the lift, if you step inside the only buttons are emergency buttons and open/close door buttons, we stood looking and not knowing how to operate the lift. Luckily a staff member came and asked where we wanted to be, she must have seen the confusion a mile off! Anyway, there is a little box outside of the lift with numbers on, you press what number floor you want then wait until it tells you which of the two lifts we should get into. Very confusing, but now we know...

...The reception staff we great and fully understood why we were a little late. Plus the fact clinic was running late by an hour and a half! We were given the xray form as usual and sent on our way to hunt out where children's xray was, luckily it was only on the next floor or so. We were down there for around half an hour, Maisie cooperated really well and allowed them to xray her hips without a fuss. We easily found our way back to the clinic waiting room and literally just waited, a member of staff told us that there was 5 people to be called before us, so Alan nipped out to make a call, then when he got back I nipped out to go and get us all something to eat...



...Time passed quite quickly until we were called, just as Alan was getting a cuppa from the machine. We followed the registrar to his room, spoke a little about how Maisie has been since she was last seen by them in January. We explained that we had her xrayed in February because she was constantly complaining her left side was sore and the result of that was that her hip is laterally subluxed, but that Mr Paterson was aware of it and he was fine to leave it and wait until this appointment. The registrar watched Maisie walk up and down his office, then she was put on the bed with her trousers off while he examined her legs. After a few minutes he said that he was going to get someone else to come and have a look, while he was gone Alan noticed that he had left his computer screen open with two of Maisie's xrays visible, December and January's xrays, so me being me, took a quick picture on my phone;


...This xray really shows how different her hips actually are. The registrar returned with Ms Maizen, Maisie's original surgeon. She watched Maisie walking and examined her on the bed. After some careful examinations and trying to force Maisie's leg to tilt to the side while in the abducted position, she said that she wants Maisie to have some physiotherapy to try and ease off this restricted movement of her left hip. Also because of the restricted movement in her hip her AVN has become worse and rather than her ball being mostly bone, what's there of her ball is mostly cartilage, which if it was left would cause the ball to become deformed which is something we don't want to happen. We are scheduled to go back to RLH at the end of September for more xrays. Fingers crossed the physio works...

Steph xxxx