About a year ago, I made a promise to myself. I promised that if everything turned out OK, I would write this post. And it did, so I am.
People who know me might know that since she was born, Moo, my seven-year-old daughter, is not terribly brilliant at not falling over. This is the story of that, which I'm writing so that maybe one day, when another parent is trying to find information on the Big Bad Internet, they might come across this, and feel a little reassured.
Anyway, for background: when Moo was a baby, I noticed that her left foot pointed inwards. I pointed this out to health visitors and doctors, and nobody seemed terribly concerned about it. After all, babies do a lot of growing, and most of these types of things sort themselves out, often before anyone's even noticed it wasn't quite right to begin with. We were referred to physio and told to do some stretches, and to have yearly checkups.
To cut a long story short, it didn't get better. It became more noticeable as she started to walk. Because her foot was pointing inwards, when she wasn't paying attention, or going too fast, she would literally trip over her own feet. We went back to paediatric orthopedics and the physio, who thought she was likely to grow out of it.
And then last year, Moo fractured her foot when she was hopping. I am still not sure why she was hopping. When she had her cast taken off, the doctor checked her over and tested her reflexes. He beckoned me over and asked, "Does she always do that?" I looked at Moo's foot. It was jiggling. I told her to stop it. The doctor told me that she wasn't doing it, that her foot was bouncing up and down on its own, because he'd smacked the bottom it. He explained that this was called "clonus", and it was usually an indication of some kind of problem with the spine.
Oh.
"I haven't worried you, have I?"
Well, do you know what, yes, actually you have. You've just told me my daughter may have something wrong with her spine. "Oh no, it's fine," was what I actually said, because I never think of the right things to say or questions to ask at the time.
So I trotted home and, as instructed, made an appointment with Moo's physio, who would be able to refer her to a neurologist.
And then I did what no-one should ever do.
I consulted Dr Google.
And I FREAKED OUT. Because you do, when you discover that the thing your little girl has is often a sign of stroke, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and all manner of other things, and you can't find anything that says anything remotely reassuring. I managed to calm myself down by rationalising that even if she did have a serious condition, she obviously had some kind of mild version of it, as she is generally a ludicrously healthy child in all other respects. So there was nothing else to do but push the horrible, scary thoughts out of our minds, and wait.
And the waiting is over. Moo has seen a very lovely neurologist and had an MRI. In a small area of her brain, the part that controls her motor control on her left side, something happened, probably during late pregnancy or birth, which damaged the tiny blood vessels and caused some of her brain tissue to scar. It means the nerves had to form around it, which affects her reflexes and muscle control in her left leg. It's nothing that's going to get worse, at least not in neurological terms. She may have problems as she approaches puberty as her bones grow faster than her muscles can stretch, and I don't know yet how big those problems might be. But she doesn't have any kind of scary-sounding condition, nothing degenerative or life-limiting, nothing that's going to affect any other part of her body or mind.
And that's it. For now, at least, that's the end of the story. The worst that's happened to Moo is a lot of grazed knees, and having to be nil-by-mouth for the MRI (we opted for a general anaesthetic - no way can that child lie still for half an hour). She's pretty much fine. It's not nothing, as so many people tried to tell me when she was a baby, but neither is it as bad as the internet would have had me believe. So if you've found this because you've been desperately googling "my child has clonus", and everything else is freaking you out, then hopefully this has offered you a little bit of information and comfort.
And if you've found this because you've got a typo in your Star Wars search, may the Force be with you.
