Kaden Update - surgery today

It has been 11 months since the accident. At first, recovery and healing came more quickly than expected. We were super excited. It seemed as though Kaden might escape somewhat unscathed which would be miraculous.

Overdue updates: 

In March, Kaden had surgery on his knee again because he had not recovered enough range of motion through PT. They did a quick clean up and broke up/removed most of the scar tissue which successfully allowed complete range of motion. Yay!

In June, Kaden had surgery to remove all the metal in his arm/wrist. The bones have all healed and the plates and screws were no longer necessary and were painful and restricting movement. Again, this surgery successfully allowed further range of motion. Yay!

What led to today’s surgery:

When Kaden was able to drive again, he noticed something was off about his back. He could feel it when he sat in the driver seat and shifted the gears of his car. He asked me to look at his back and it was extremely noticeable that something was really wrong. Not only did his scapula come away from his body when lifting his arm, but he could not lift his arm up and could not bear any weight, like picking up a glass of water to drink. It is his non-dominant hand and he had been compensating in other ways. He didn’t notice at first because there was so much else going on that it didn’t seem critical and he thought it was an injury that would gradually heal.

We made a doctor appointment and the doctor confirmed he had a winged scapula but he didn’t really know what to do about it. The physical therapist added some exercises to try to help the condition, but it was not effective. In May we saw an orthopedic specialist who was immediately amazed at how bad the condition was and told us surgery was required. Typically, they try to do PT before deciding on surgery, but since the PT was already happening and the condition was so severe, they set up some tests. A few weeks later, after 90 minutes of tests (basically electrocuting all of Kaden’s back and arm muscles one at a time) confirmed that his nerves were not functioning properly, a surgery date was tentatively set. We really only found out in the last week that it would really happen today.

So this morning at 5am, we checked in to the hospital. This surgery is no guarantee that his arm will be fixed, but it was our only option. Basically, they are going to use part of his pectoral muscle and cadaver tendon to control his scapula.

Please pray that the surgery is effective.

We will not know for several weeks. Kaden will be in an arm brace, completely immobilized, for 12 weeks - longer than any other surgery to date. It will be hard, but we hope it will lead to better use of the arm. Once movement is allowed, there will be a significant amount of PT and time required for complete recovery and for the body to accept old muscles taking on new jobs.