Em's leg surgery

A couple of people have e-mailed me recently about Emily's leg surgery so I thought I'd blog it.


Back at the beginning of the blog I wrote about an embolism that she had in her leg after her first surgery. The clot had to be surgically removed and as she was so tiny quite a bit of damage was done to her femoral artery. The upshot of it was that the leg didn't grow for a while and by the time she began to walk at around 17 months her right leg was obviously shorter and thinner than the left. She was having physio as she was generally a little delayed in her development and it was clear that she had a weakness in her leg that was hindering her mobility. After a referral to orthopaedics we had a 6 monthly checks and the growth in that leg continued to fall short for a while. Eventually it stablised and CT scans showed it to be around 3.5 cm shorter. She wore a raised shoe throughout her childhood and thankfully this minimised the development of scoliosis although she was plagued by hip and leg pain.



Our lovely surgeon suggested a procedure called epiphysiodesis; basically arresting the growth in the 'good' leg to allow the shorter leg to catch up. He kept an eye on her growth via the CT scans and she had bone age x-rays as the timing of the surgery is very important. She had the initial procedure done around her 12th birthday. The surgery involves placing pins (they look like mahoosive Frankenstien bolts on the x-ray) around the growth plates; two crossing the plate above the knee in the femur, two crossing the plate under the knee and a little one at the top of the little leg bone (I have no idea about the proper name of it). Around two years later she was deemed to have equal length legs and the pins were removed. Placing the pins was more painful and intrusive than removing them and recover was slower. She spent some time on crutches, about 3 weeks for the placement and also had physio but she quickly regained the range of movement in her knee although the physio commented that both her legs had global weakness. She has lost a little of her adult height through the procedure but is heading towards 5ft 5 so it is not a noticeable loss.

After many years of having to choose her footwear carefully to cope with the raise she can now wear shoes like those chosen by many teenagers. Even if her dad disapproves!