Motherhood didn’t begin how I imagined. An emergency cesarean at 34 weeks, no familiar faces in the room except my husband, and a 17-day NICU stay set the tone for a whirlwind initiation into parenting. I clung to every word of the medical professionals, trusting their advice completely. At that time, I didn’t have the confidence to question anything or advocate for Rudy beyond the basics.
When we were discharged, we left with a stack of papers, instructions for follow-ups, and a small pharmacy in tow—iron supplements, vitamin D drops, and a referral for a routine hip ultrasound. Rudy ticked the boxes for a screening: firstborn, cesarean delivery, and preterm. We went to the scan at six weeks, armed with an emergency bottle to keep him still. The sonographer was quiet, so we assumed no news was good news and carried on.
Two weeks later, I was in a shopping center when the phone rang. It was our pediatrician, asking if we could bring Rudy in the next day to be fitted for a hip brace. My stomach dropped. “What do you mean? A brace? What’s hip dysplasia? How bad is it?” I was overwhelmed, scrambling to process his words through the noise and his thick accent.
At the appointment, we learned Rudy’s hips were borderline shallow, enough to require 23 hours a day in a harness for three months. The fitting was traumatic. Rudy screamed the entire time, and I had to hold back my tears as the technician struggled to adjust the straps. When she mentioned we might need a new car seat because of the brace, I wanted to scream. We’d just spent $800 on what we thought was “the perfect one.” Thankfully, it fit. Small mercies, I thought.
We drove home in silence. I sat in the back seat, looking at Rudy’s tiny, braced body as tears streamed down my face. This wasn’t what I envisioned. He already struggled with reflux and tummy troubles, and now he couldn’t even squirm to find relief. Every part of me felt that this wasn’t fair and then I felt silly for how much it was affecting me
The first few weeks were hard. Harder than hard. The brace seemed to magnify his discomfort. He screamed more, slept less, and every bath became bittersweet. He’d relax as we gently washed him, only to stiffen the moment we Velcroed the harness back on. I cried daily. I scoured Facebook groups and Google, searching for hope or someone to say it would get better.
Eventually, we reached a breaking point. The screaming, the reflux, the endless doubt—I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked again to see the original scan report. My gut told me something was off. My sister a chiropractor didn’t pick anything up, the child health nurse couldn’t see any obvious differences in leg creases and I just felt we were doing more harm than good with the brace. After a lot of persistence (and a lot of pushback), we managed to get Rudy rescanned.
This time, the orthopaedic surgeon greeted me with a hug and an apology. “His hips are perfect. He never should have been in that brace,” he said. The first scan, done too early for his adjusted age, had given a false reading. Relief washed over me. I cried, of course. Not from sadness, but from exhaustion and vindication. The surgeon said this unfortunately is a common occurrence when paediatricians send for orthopaedic related scans and interpret results differently to what a hip specialist would.
That brace now sits in a cupboard, a symbol of my first real fight as a mum. It taught me something valuable: to trust my instincts, even when I feel completely out of my depth. Motherhood isn’t easy, and it rarely looks how we think it will. But we’re stronger than we give ourselves credit for.
The most helpful resources I found were;
https://starfishbabes.com.au/
Hip dysplasia: what is it, what are the signs and how to prevent it in your baby | Queensland Health
And hip dysplasia support groups on Facebook.