Nash Christopher Gehrls :)

On August 10, 2010 at 6:30pm Nash Christopher Gehrls was born.  He was 7lbs 14oz and 21inches long.  The most amazing day of my life.  We were so excited to meet this little angel and finally see his sweet little face.  And just as I suspected...PERFECT!!  He is so loved by so many people I just can't even explain how blessed we are to have such wonderful family and friends.  Probably the proudest person was his big brother, Aidan.  He got to be one of the first people to come to the hospital and hold him.  It was so sweet, he wore his "I'm the Big Brother" t-shirt for 2 days :)

Of course when he was born, Chris and I were anxious to see this little leg that had been such an issue througout my pregnancy.  The funny thing was, you couldn't even tell!!  Unless you stretched them out, they looked perfectly normal.  It wasn't until he started to grow a little that you could see a difference.  To be honest, I was relieved.  We hadn't told many people about this yet and we wanted to get comfortable with it and more educated about it before we explained it to everyone.  We just wanted to enjoy him a while before all the reality set in.

We slowly started explaining Nash's condition to the people closest to us.  We really needed support.  It was hard to talk about at first and  most of the time I would cry when I told the story, but I've gotten much better about it. Here it goes...

PFFD is a very rare condition.  Between 1 in 800,000 to 1 in 1 million babies are born with PFFD.  They don't know what causes it, and previous to Dr. Paley developing a surgery to fix it, the options were mostly amputation and use of a prosthetic leg.  With the delay in bone growth, the hip is usually affected as well.  There are a few classifications of severity.  Beginning with 1a, 1b, 1c to 3 or 4.  1a is the least severe hip deformity, 4 would be the worst and very difficult to fix.  So you have to correct the hip deformity first before you can lengthen the bone.  The surgery that Dr. Paley developed is called the 'Super Hip' procedure.  It was designed specifically for this particular condition or birth defect.  He is one of only two doctors that have ever performed this surgery.  However, he has done over 200 of them and the other doctor in Baltimore has done less than 30.  That alone made our decision to go see Dr. Paley much easier.   This surgery can't be done until he is at least 2yrs old.  Then a year after that he will have his first leg lenthening.  He will likely have 3 lengthenings in his 'growing years' One every 4 years. The good news is that when this is all said and done he will have two legs the same length!  That is our goal.  I know our little Nash is tough...he's proven it to us before so we know he will be fine.  He's our little hero :)