Aviagail in a Spica Cast - Lessons Learned

It has been a while since I last posted but I thought I would use the blog to offer some free advice for parents who will go through a similar experience that Esther and I have had over the last 3 weeks since our 3 year old daughter Avigail broke her femur and was placed in a Spica Body Cast from her foot to her chest for at least 6 weeks:

Things for parents to remember:
1- The pain of the actual break will go away after a couple of days -- it will be very hard and emotionally trying to you to see your child in such discomfort but remember that once s/he gets through the first couple of days the pain subsides

2- Crawling: The cast is strong so do not be afraid of picking her up, letting her crawl, letting her sit -- what ever s/he is comfortable doing with the cast -- let her -- see video of my daughter:



3- Getting Around with Your Child: It is crucial that you find a comfortable way for you to get her outside and moving around. I think that Spica casts are not all positioned the same way so there is no universally good solution for this -- to our luck our daughter's cast allowed her to fit perfectly in a Mountain Buggy Stroller -- this has made a tremendous difference for us

4- Going to the Bathroom and keeping the cast clean: this has been a real challenge for us. While our daughter is toilet trained there is no way real practical way for her to go to the bathroom with her cast so we have had to go back to pampers. What you do is take a smaller then usual size pamper and pull-off the side tabs and simply stuff it into the gap in the cast. Then there are many different approaches to what else to put -- some place adult pads around the sides of the gap to ensure no leakage and others place a large diaper over the cast to keep everything in place and to be a 'back-stop' (though at that point you are too late for keeping the cast dry)

In any event, we have found that - despite our best efforts - invariably the cast will get wet. This seems just part of the deal. There are ways to try and deal with it (some say toothbrush and some toothpaste to absorb the smell -- others suggest equal parts water and viniger on a cloth over the stain) we have tried both and neither seemed to help much. My advice is to live with it and focus on keeping your daughter as comfortable as possible rather than trying all sorts of innovative ways of getting rid of the smell.