Advice needed - talipes / casts

[WendyAspin321]

Good morning.

I hope we are all well.

I’m hoping I can get some help, advice or guided in the right direction.

My LO has talipes. For the first 6 months of my birth we told all that we needed to do was exercises to her feet and over time we would see the improvements. After 6 months we saw no improvement so we scheduled an appointment with our Orthopaedic and requested an alternative solution.

Eventually we was given boots and bars which we have been using for 18 months. It has been absolutely brutal and I feel absolutely awful. We’ve spent countless nights with no sleep and constant crying as my LO can’t put up with the pain. We’ve found it extremely difficult and it’s rare she makes it more than 5-6 hours a night.

Today we saw our Orthopaedic, he says she now has to go into casts as soon as possible.

I feel absolutely awful. Has anyone experienced this at a similar age?. Is there any advice or anyone who can assure me or answer questions?.

I'm so sorry to hear that things happened for you this way round. Usually with both talipes and club foot, the baby is put into casts first (a fresh set each week, gradually changing the position of the feet with each cast) for several weeks. This can take 6-8 weeks or so. Then for talipes, they usually do surgery to insert a pin into the foot, do a tenotomy at the same time (where they release the tendon at the back of the foot) and then place them in one last set of casts for a few weeks. I was born with bilateral vertical talipes, my son has one foot with talipes and one club foot and my 8 week old daughter has bilateral talipes

Once the feet are fully corrected, that's the point that they should go into boots and bar to maintain the correction. It's supposed to prevent relapse. It doesn't do any correction. They wear this for 23 hours a day for the first 3 months and then the hours get gradually reduced until it's just at night time and nap times until they're 5. Feel free to message me if you have any other questions, I'll always try to help if I can