I was telling you the other day about a little girl with bone cancer that is in Chicago this week for surgery. She’s the reason I have the two extra children this week that I’m providing respite care for. Her mother didn’t want to accept the treatment that the children’s hospital here in Michigan wanted to provide for her daughter, which was amputation. Three years ago when she was told that amputation was the only possible solution she got on the internet and searched for an alternative. That was how she found out about a treatment that wasn’t well known at the time and had never been used on a child as young as her daughter; she was four years old at the time.

So this week she took her child to Chicago to have the implant, called Repiphysis, replaced in her daughter’s leg with a larger implant. The implant can “grow” when the doctors beam painless electromagnetic rays at the leg that make the rod slowly expand. However, the rod can’t expand indefinitely, so as long as a child continues to grow it needs to be replaced periodically with a larger rod, which is why this treatment isn’t usually used on very young children since they have so many growth spurts.

The surgery went well but the doctors had to remove a lot of scar tissue that had built up otherwise her range of motion would be impaired. They also ran into another problem, her hemoglobin count dropped so low that doctors insisted she have a blood transfusion, much to her mother’s dismay. Because of that, she had to spend an extra night in the hospital and she has to return to Chicago again next week. She also mentioned that her daughter is walking around and tolerating the pain well so she feels definitely blessed.

Thus, I have the two extra children again tonight however, she didn’t mention next week, when I spoke with her today. Her family is a licensed foster family here in Michigan and so are we. We foster parents have an unwritten agreement to provide respite care for each other’s foster children or adopted children for the daily room and board rate plus any difficulty of care rate. That way we can afford to go places if we have another foster family provide care and we expect reciprocating care. Base rate comes out at just over fifty cents an hour so it is quite affordable.

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