A Pain in the Leg.

When I picked Robbie up from the station just after midnight, I could tell straight away that his legs must be hurting because he was walking very badly. He has been to loads of meetings recently, staying late at work then doing more work at home, I think sitting too long in the wrong sort of chairs is part of the problem. He insisted that he was OK and he chattered incessantly about trains and work so I couldn't get a word in about legs or anything else. He thinks that if he insists that everything is alright, it really will be alright, but deep down he knows he is lying to himself.

Needless to say I was tired by the time we got home and I went to bed leaving Robbie to potter around downstairs. He woke me when he came to bed because he was making a lot of groaning noises, but I didn't take too much notice and I went straight back to sleep. We had a dreadful night, it was like Kenny Everett meets Frankie Howerd, his legs were waving around as if they were possessed and there was a sound track of Ooohs, Ahhs and a crescendo of swear words. We were both exhausted this morning, I begged him to go to the doctors and to my surprise he agreed. They can't do much, but at least they can give him something stronger to deal with the pain.

No Easy Answers

Robbie and I were rather anxious when we went to the hospital to see his consultant yesterday. We were surprised to find that we didn't have to wait very long until Robbie was called into the consulting room. The consultant explained that the MRI scan had been worthwhile because they were able to get some good pictures of Robbies spine and the pictures had been reviewed by a specialist at Oxford. As expected there was clear evidence of the damage caused by his spina bifida and they could see that his spinal cord was significantly longer than normal with less smaller branches coming from it. The good new was that there is nothing on the scan pictures to suggest that there is any tethering of the cord at the moment. There were words of caution too, Robbie should never have a lumbar puncture or any procedure on his lower back because it could cause serious damage. So the messsage was to keep walking, to accept the falling over and the pain as just part of him and to take great care of his lower back because if anything goes wrong with it they will not be able to put it right. It sounds a bit grim and it would have been nice if we could have found a way to stop the falls and to deal with the pain, but we didn't really expect that. I think we just have to be grateful that the news was as good as we could have hoped for. So now he just has to learn to bounce when he falls over and hopefully he will try not to fall in front of a car or a train!