Teanie & the Bean!: Le Torticollis

For anyone who doesn't know - which I'm sure is most of you considering I haven't made this "public" yet. I really try not to post every detail of my entire life on Facebook. Notice I wrote " really try." There's a reason I started blog. :) Anyways, in April, Elizabeth was diagnosed with Torticollis. Which totally sounds like some horrible disease but don't worry, it's not. Rather than explain it myself and to save you some time, I googled the definition for you, and don't lie to yourself - you were gunna google it.

Tor·ti·col·lis/ˌtôrtiˈkälis/

Noun:

A condition in which the head becomes persistently turned to one side, often associated with painful muscle spasms.

So Bean doesn't have the painful muscle spasms but was born looking to her right. That's just how she is comfortable and as a result her neck muscles have become under developed and her head started to "misshape" because she was on one side so much. For those of you not obsessed with bebes or aren't aware, infants heads are surprisingly soft and form as their brain grows.

Bean a week old - notice she still has hair in this picture.

I take her into children's physical therapy now and she is much better. We basically just sit down and do a bunch of stretches for 45 minutes while the therapist looks to see if she's improved or not. When I first took her, in April, she could only look 20% out of 100% to her left - at her last visit, in May she was looking 80%. I was pretty excited to here that. Honestly, the past visits I had been to made me feel like a horrible parent. I wasn't told whether or not she was improving and just given "homework" to do. I always left the office with a bad vibe and in a crappy mood. We ended up getting a new therapist in May as we had some scheduling problems with our last and it turned out to be a great switch for us. I now know I AM helping Elizabeth and she IS improving.

Apparently Torticollis is pretty common and maybe I'm the only one who hasn't heard of it. It's something I wasn't worried about at all while I was pregnant or even after she was born. I was just happy to see she had 10 fingers and 10 toes,etc. The "normal" things.