I guess I should start from the beginning, over eight years ago. Everything was going fine with my first pregnancy until I hit 31 weeks and my water broke. It was a Saturday, and I was whisked away in an ambulance (my first and only ambulance ride) to another hospital 2 hours away from where we live. That was the nearest hospital with a NICU. I was put on bed rest there and was expected to stay there on bed rest for the next six weeks. I only lasted a few days though. They discovered I also had placenta previa, and by Monday evening I started bleeding out (I think they said the placenta had started to rupture). They monitored me through the night very closely, and the baby's heart rate kept dropping, so they did an emergency c-section Tuesday evening to get him out. He was very tiny, only 3 lbs, and was born on March 19th 2002 (he was due May 19th). We named him Noah Arron. It was not at all how I expected it to go. It was so scary going through a c-section and having a premature baby as well. Right after he was born they knew something was wrong with his leg. At first they thought maybe his leg had broken in utero, and then had set on it's own but in a weird way. It was later discovered that he had fibular hemimelia. He had a curve in the tibia bone and a slight curve in the femur also. He was also missing most of his fibula bone. As if all that we had been through was not frightening enough we now had this to face. Something we knew nothing about and had never even heard of. We started researching it on the internet which is always a bad idea because everyone is different and most of the things we read about on the internet were severe cases, so it of course scared us even more. Noah spent 6 weeks in the NICU after he was born and went through all kinds of testing while he was there. He had MRI's, CAT scans, a spinal tap, and other tests done because they continued to think there were more things wrong with him. There wasn't, other than his leg there was nothing wrong with him. Thank the Lord! It was definitely a difficult time in our lives. After finally coming home from the hospital he then had to go right back again for hernia surgery. That was only the beginning of all the surgeries he had and still has to face. At about 6 months old he was fitted with his first AFO (Ankle-Foot Orthosis) for his leg. From then on I continually had people tell me he had lost a shoe when they saw the brace on one leg. He was about 17 months old when he finally started walking. Being premature had put him behind developmentally so he went through physical therapy as a baby as well. I can't remember when he started that, but I think it was somewhere between 3 and 6 months, and I believe he continued with it until he was around a year old. He saw an orthopedic specialist every few months at the hospital he was born at and continues to do so. Many children with this are often missing toes and a lot of times the only course of action is to amputate. Noah had all of his toes and a very optimistic doctor that thought he could help Noah, so limb lengthening was what was discussed from the very beginning for him. The problems with his leg would cause his right leg to be shorter than the left, and as he grew so would the length discrepancy. For the first 5 years of his life his appointments with the specialist were just for x-rays, and for him to keep an eye on how Noah's leg was growing. At 5 years of age he had his first surgery on his leg. He is now 8 and a half years old and has had 7 surgeries on his leg. In 2008 he had his first limb lengthening surgery. The one we had heard about for years from his specialist and were dreading. I remember praying all the time when he was first born that his leg would just grow normally and keep up with the other leg, and that the curve in the bones would grow out, so that he wouldn't have to go through all of this especially the limb lengthening. It was very difficult, but we all got through it, and Noah did so much better than anyone expected.
