I’m sorry to hear about your two year old. It’s a very traumatic time, as you know. To answer your question, William had a helical spiral fracture. To quote the Dr. who performed the ‘fix’, they don’t even try to mate the two break surfaces together. They generally just try to get them pointing in the same general direction, and let the body do the healing. The initial ’set’ looked more like he had lined a couple of match sticks up in parallel with a bit of overlap.

When the cast came off, you were still able to determine where the break was on the Xray’s because of the density of the bone, and slight uneven area around the break site. We’ve followed up with the Dr. until the last time, when basically we were told “come back in a few years and we’ll look again, but we’re not going to take any corrective action if needed until he’s 15+ years.” At that point, he didn’t even bother to take the Xray’s because we could tell they wouldn’t show anything. The progression of healing was very apparent when you look at the Xray’s in sequence.

His legs are still a bit uneven. Less than an inch. The response from the Dr was that for the next 15 years, the unevenness will shift back and forth as the body heals, grows, and tries to even things out. So, it’s going to start out a bit shorter, but because of the break, you’ll have increased growth in that area, and it will end up longer. Then the weight transfer will cause the other leg to grow more, and vice versa throughout most of his growth years, hopefully getting smaller each time until it’s mainly leveled out.

So. Yeah, he wobbles a bit when running. He can’t keep up with his 5 year old sister when running. (would he be able to at this point without the break? dunno.) Does he laugh hard, and run as hard as he can anyways? Yup. Personally, I feel that a large part of his difficulty is his age and development more than the fracture at this point. Sure, it affected it, because he ‘lost’ 6 months of walking, running and playing on it. But honestly, I think THAT is more responsible than the physical break was. My wife might disagree.

Let us know if you have more questions. I know there wasn’t a heck of a lot of information on the web when it happened to William, so I’ve left the site up with our experiences. It’s not the BEST resource in the world, but it does describe what happened pretty well, in my opinion. It doesn’t capture the extent of the emotion. I don’t think anything could.

Much love,
Kira, Nate, Christian, and Colin
xoxoxo