Nastiness

So never I have I more second-guessed myself as a mother as I have with this whole clubfoot thing. Right after I published yesterday's post, I decided that the smell was just too much and that the cast should be replaced, hubby agreed. I called the doctor and he told me to take it off and come in tomorrow (which is now today). Hubby convinced me that we should leave it on until the evening (I called the doc before lunch). Something was telling me to just do it, but I didn't. The only thing I could go by was Hayden's mood and he seemed fine, so I left it. The smell all day was atrocious. By the time we got to dinnertime, I was inhaling my food so I could go and take the cast off because I felt nauseous from smelling it all day.

I started unwrapping it and got maybe two rounds when I realized the cast was wet - his skin had wept through almost the entire cast. He got agitated as I was removing it, but not too much. There were three spots that had obviously been "rotting"; behind the knee, the side of his big toe and the top of his foot. The top of his foot and his big toe semed fine, but the back of his knee was pretty bad. The odor was beyond anything I can describe. The closest I can come is rotting potatoes - you know, raw potatoes that have turned to soup and they have that faint pee smell mixed in with rot?

I took him upstairs so I could lay him on his tummy on our bed and inspect the back of his knee further. He really did not want me anywhere near his leg and got very mad when I snapped a couple of photos, so the pictures don't do it justice. Think of words like "festering", "pus", "weeping", "gooey", "mushy" and maybe you can get an image of what it was like. One part of it had an actual hole that was gaping open slightly about a centimetre in size and thankfully it was not bleeding. You can kind of see it in the second picture where it appears slightly darker than the rest of the redness. Here they are:


Figure 1.


Figure 2.

I was sick to my stomach for several hours. So hubby and I have decided to have him put into the regular shoes until his custom ones come in. We just can't justify casting him any more. In addition to that, he scratches (or claws) at himself every time his skin is free from casts. Just this morning, he took a gouge out of the back of his knee and it was bleeding like crazy. Skin is an organ that needs air to thrive and it has been far too long. So we don't care if we have to buy the other shoes and use them for a week or even two days. We'll donate them to Dr. Pirani's Ugandan project, or someone who really can't afford them here. We just want our baby out of casts.