Thankful - Day 17

Day 17:

I came across these today when I was putting a laundry away in my son Tyler's closet.

It was incredibly overwhelming and I sat down on the floor in the closet and I just wept and wept.  I walked into the playroom where my husband and my children were playing, just held them up for them to see, and turned around and walked out before my kids could see I had been crying.  My husband just looked at me, smiled and said "Yep.  Wow!"

If you don't know what these are, these are my son Tyler's "shoes" that he had to wear 23 hours a day when he was a baby to correct his clubbed feet.  He slept in them.  He nursed in them.  He lived in them. The one hour a day that he didn't have to wear them were spent stretching his heels and moving his legs so that he could gain range of motion from his short achilles tendons.

I can't believe how far he has come.  You would never had known that my son had a really rough start.  That he didn't get his first "real bath" until he was 4 weeks old because of the casts he wore.  That even though he weighed almost 10 pounds when he was born, that after you added in the weight of his casts, I was holding a 14 pound newborn.  That he didn't learn how to crawl - he learned how to drag himself, army-crawl style.  That he didn't rollover - he used momentum to flip his whole body over, casts and all.  That when he finally figured it out, he didn't walk - HE RAN.

I have no idea why something so silly has gotten to me like it has today, but for some reason I couldn't fight the tears.  And I still can't.  OMG, I have so much to be thankful for.

Today, and every day of my life, I am thankful for DOCTORS and nurses and modern medicine, and those in the medical profession who strive every day of their lives to help people like me and my son live a better life.  A normal life.

I am thankful for Dr. Robert Caudle, who hugged a crying mother like me as they wheeled my son off to surgery, not once, but twice - and told me everything was going to be all right - that he would be a normal child and I had nothing to worry about.  I am thankful for the nurses in his office who were so ecstatic the day I came into the office and told them that TYLER WAS WALKING months ahead of what they had projected.  I am thankful for our insurance company, who never batted an eyelash when it came to things we needed to have done - from casting to surgery to medical devices.  I am thankful for my mother who helped me get through it because she had done it once herself with my little sister.  I am thankful for my father who talked me through it when I found out we were going to be dealing with this when our baby was born, and reminding me that this was NOTHING and we would be just fine.  

I have so much to be thankful for.