Over the past several months, Sadie has been visiting the Cranial Facial Center at Medical City of Dallas Children's Hospital for plagiocephaly. I have blogged about it briefly because we have been going once a month for x-rays & scans of her head. Unfortunately, all our hard work has not paid off. She still goes to physical therapy once a week, I still carry her in my front carrier a lot instead of the stroller, we still do lots of stretches, exercises, etc. but apparently it hasn't helped. She has been a back sleeper since she was born & she sleeps almost 16 hours a day. I have a feeling that is the cuplrit. Although it's quite frustrating, because now that she can roll all 4 ways, she started sleeping on her sides & her stomach a couple of weeks ago. Too bad she wouldn't do that all those months we tried!
Since she turned 6 months old, we had to make a decision regarding her head shape, therefore we have decided to move forward with the Doc Band. It is a medical device (basically a helmet) that she will wear 23 hours a day to help re-shape her skull. This was a really hard decision to make, but after many discussions with her pediatrician, physical therapist & the doctors at the hospital, we feel this is the right decision for her. We will continue with therapy once a week while she wears the helmet. We have seen huge improvement in her neck muscles & I am so glad we were able to self correct that.
Once we decided to do move forward with this decision, we visited with 3 different companies in town. We finally narrowed it down to Cranial Technologies. We actually know a few people who have used them & they come highly recommended. We had our first appointment with them this week. It was very similar to her other evaluations. They took a lot of pictures of her head from all angles & did a lot of measurements.
Obviously she is used to this because she has had this done several times. But this place also had some awesome toys to entertain her while we were waiting in our own room:
She had no idea what we were there for - as far as she was concerned, it was play time!
We go back next week to have her head re-scanned. From that they will build a custom mold of her skull to use as a resource for building her Doc Band. It usually takes about 2 weeks for it to be built, so she will probably get it sometime in early July. I will definitely post some pictures of her before the helmet from all directions so you can see what I am talking about. From the front, she looks completely even. In the meantime, feel free to check out the company's website if you want to see what the Doc Band looks like or learn more about it.
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