After 2 years in plaster casts and x-rays, today Reuben was x-rayed again. We had prepared ourselves to hear the news that his spine had got worse but it was still a shock to hear it. The curve has increased over the last couple of months and the decision was made to put Reuben on the list for surgery to have growing rods put in his spine. This will happen around late August. In previous discussions they had said they like children to be at least 4 years old to have the surgery when they have bigger bones so we thought if it was going to happen we would have time to adjust to the idea but the spinal surgeon didn't want him to get any worse and he is confident that he can do the surgery successfully so we trust his expertise. Reuben will be one of the youngest to have this done. He will be in hospital for a week afterwards and there will be about a 6 week recovery. He will have 2 rods either side of his spine attached with screws at the top and bottom. Every 6 months he will go back to have the rods lengthened for about the next 10 years at which point they will do the next stage which is a spinal fusion with bone graft. Reuben's whole childhood has just been planned out for him in appointments and surgeries :(
But Reuben is happy, he is lively and currently singing Old MacDonald at the top of his voice at almost 10pm! He had a sleep on the way back from the hospital so is now wide awake and the whole street knows about it! :) Reuben doesn't know anything about what is happening which is quite a blessing really, it's hard sometimes not being able to explain things to him and warn him of things coming up but other times we are glad that he will not really remember any of it.
So that's about it really, I tried to keep it brief so you weren't reading lots of jargon! we were bombarded with lots of information which we have to digest a bit.
Here is the x-ray from today. (facing forwards)
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