St. Louis Calling, At Last

We have been really struggling with the wi-fi connection this week - thanks for updating the blog in the week Jo.
On Wednesday we had a consultation with Dr Dobbs who is the orthopaedic surgeon who will operate on Daniel next Tuesday morning. He is experienced in this type of surgery and we are confident in his abilities to do a very good job. He will make an incision on Daniel's heel tendons and also the hamstrings on the inner thigh, and this will lengthen them to help Daniel straighten his legs and walk with heels touching the ground. The procedure will take an hour and a half, and Daniel will have one night in hospital. The recovery time for Daniel's legs to strengthen will be 3 months.
Physio has been progressing well this week and Daniel is a lot stronger with his frame. He has been working on the treadmill, static cycle (with a new pb of 28mph!),and walking the balance beam a lot. He did a session on the scooter board, which is a square board on swivel wheels that you sit on and use the legs to push or pull yourself along. We had a good race around the physio suite and at the same time Daniel had a good hamstring workout.
Today (Friday) Daniel finished the session sitting in a chair and getting to a fairly upright standing position with myself and the therapist just using our hands lightly to help him balance.
Quite a bit of time has been spent adjusting Daniel's AFOs (leg braces)and the team has made a good effort to get them comfortable for Daniel. So far they have modified them four times.
This time next week we will be on the plane and I think the time will go very quickly, but we still have a lot of important work to get done yet.

Good news from back home is that Lizzie and Simon and daughter Erin have had the arrival of a new family member, baby Niamh, and so big congratulations from all of us. Totally awesome (as they say).