Ben Update

So after our emergency room visit Ben no longer seemed to be in pain...which was great, but also very confusing to me.  He still wasn't interested in walking or bearing weight.

Here he is on October 1st after his shower.  I tried to get him to walk.  He barely was putting any weight on his feet and this walk from our bedroom to his killed my back since I was carrying most of his 80 lbs hunched over.

We started having him sit on the floor to play with his toys again.

We had to encourage him to move around by putting things out of reach.  He easily started crawling.

On Matt's birthday we heard back from his surgeon's office and they told us to go back to the hospital and get xrays on both hips to make sure there was nothing wrong there.  So I took him in before school got out hoping to get back before Matt came home.  (The school didn't want him to come since we didn't know what was going on with his movement yet...even though he could have just sat in his wheelchair like he had been for weeks and been fine.)

The hip xrays ended up fine.

After talking with the nurse again they suggested we watch him for a week or two and if he still wouldn't walk then we could bring him in to be seen.

We took the wheelchair back to home health care and just gently encouraged weight bearing as much as possible and still carried him at times.

The following pics are from general conference weekend.  Ben was super snuggly :)

I cut it down as much as possible but there were just too many sweet ones.

Over the month we saw gradual improvement.

Although, after a couple of weeks, he seemed to be much more willing to walk any place other than our home.  After 2 or 3 days of staying home from school, they let him come back and after a week or so his teacher reported that he loved being out of his chair and wanted to stand and walk all the time (which surprised me since I wasn't seeing that at home).

When we finally went to the dome for dinner he walked around pretty naturally as well.

However, at home, he scooted around on his bottom when he really wanted to get somewhere.  Otherwise, he didn't move around much.  He really didn't walk at home consistently without us encouraging/assisting him until the very end of the month.