Wednesday, February 2, 2011

At least his head won't look like a bowling ball

Will was scanned for his helmet yesterday. I'm happy to report that he was a champ throughout the entire appointment.

When we got to the orthotist's office, Dr. Bob took some measurements of Will's head. Though his head grew quite a bit in the last month, his width to depth ratio stayed exactly the same, and his left to right comparison actually got a little worse. Dr. Bob said that's strong evidence that his head won't correct on his own. So helmet it is.

Each orthotic helmet is custom made and requires a custom mold. They actually used to cast each baby's head to make the mold. Can you imagine? Dr. Bob said he never did a cast without the baby screaming.

Luckily, Dr. Bob's office has this new scan technology that takes a 3D picture instead. No casting required. Will had to wear a white mesh bonnet with a sensor attached to the top. Then Dr. Bob took his fancy camera and scanned all around Will's head. Will had to keep his head straight throughout the entire scan, but he did great. He was too enamored with the duck puppet Dr. Bob's assistant had to look elsewhere.

We selected a solid blue helmet, as I plan to decorate with vinyl stickers from Bling Your Band. But today I got a call from Dr. Bob's office saying that their new helmet manufacturer doesn't offer any solid colors except pink (helpful). These were my choices of helmet designs:
























Um, ew. Could those be any uglier? As Ben pointed out, many of them look like bowling balls.

I was so bummed. I mean, it's bad enough that my kid has to wear a helmet, but if I have to stare at an ugly pattern for 4 months, we're going to have real issues. Thankfully Dr. Bob's office contacted the manufacturer, who can also do plain white. So plain white it is, with some darling vinyl stickers.

Will gets his helmet next Wednesday, so stay tuned.

2 comments:

  1. Yay! I think maybe you should just paint it with chalkboard paint and then write on it what you feel describes the day. Alternately, this would allow you to write things like "Whachyo looking at?" or "At least the helmet comes off, you are stuck with that face forever." :)

    Snark on a helmet.

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