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Symptoms of Natalie’s Hip Dysplasia

Our daughter Natalie was born on February 12, 2006. She was the average healthy baby that every parent hopes they will be. The pediatrician checked her from head to toe and found that nothing was out of place. At least that is what every one thought at the time.

It was when Natalie was around four months old that we noticed that her right hip was not as flexible as the other. My husband is not flexible at all and we thought that she had inherited this from him. Little did we know that can be a sign of a dislocated hip. I did not even know that babies could have a dislocated hip or hip dysplasia. We did not really think any more about it for awhile. This was our second child, but because our first was the picture of health we did not even consider that there might be something wrong. Actually no one in our entire family really thought that anything was wrong.

Two months later I was playing with Natalie on the floor and decided to measure and see how much she had grown since her last check-up. This is when I noticed that one of her legs was shorter than the other. Her right leg was actually shorter than her measurement from her last check-up which had been a month prior to this time. Natalie’s legs were ¾ of an inch different. She was about six months old by this time. She has an appointment with her regular doctor two weeks later so I waited to for her appointment thinking that it was all in my head. I thought I was a paranoid mother who constantly finds things wrong with children. You know the kind where their children always have the symptoms of every new disease or sickness. I talked to the doctor anyway and found out that I was right it was shorter and Natalie was scheduled to see an orthopedic doctor the following day. Natalie’s doctor also found that she had torticollis.

Torticollis is where one side of the neck muscles will grow shorter than the other side. This causes the head to lean to one side or the other. Natalie was scheduled to start physical therapy for this condition two days later. We would go through three weeks of physical therapy to see no improvement at all. I even did extra therapy to make sure that I was doing my part to make her better. It did not work, but there was a reason why. A study showed that 5percent of babies who have torticollis also have hip dysplasia. We did not know that at the time either and apparently neither did the physical therapist. The physical therapist had no idea why the therapy was not working. After Natalie’s surgery, her neck was perfectly fine. We decided that she was using her head to balance the rest of her body so she could sit up. She no longer needed physical therapy, she needed surgery to correct her dislocated hip.