Mia's mysterious injuries

I can't find a synonym for "injury" that begins with "m" to give the title of this post a nice alliterative feel. Some English major I am!

Anyway, Mia had some mysterious injuries this week. Nothing serious, and easily solved, but still weird. On Monday I noticed she had a few nasty-looking bruises on the back of her leg, right below and right above her left knee. This is where her AFO ends, so we assumed it had something to do with that. We kept her brace off of her on Tuesday the 4th, and on Wednesday I brought it up to her physical therapist. He said that they always look at her leg when they make her walk and they hadn't noticed anything. We put her brace on and checked out where the bruises match up, and it appears the only way she could have gotten bruises where they were on her leg is from bending her knee almost all the way. Then the top of the AFO would dig into the area right above her knee. The problem is, she hardly ever bends her knee that far. Occasionally when she is sitting in the chair in the living room, I will bend her leg to keep her from sliding down off of it, but I don't bend it that far and it's never for that long. She doesn't have any chairs that dig into the back of her leg like that - it has to be the AFO. But how it happened is kind of weird.

Then, on Wednesday night, we noticed that the bottom of a few of her toes had blood on them. What the crap? Krys investigated and determined that it was probably because her toenails cut her. On the bottom of her toes? Well, yes. We cut her toenails a lot, but they are still sharp. Is this a common phenomenon among kids who don't walk? Krys figured out that she is curling her toes so tightly that a nail on one toe will cut the one next to it. We wondered if her shoes were too tight, but after checking it out, we're wondering if they're too loose. Mia curls her toes quite often, so we just have to be more diligent in cutting her nails. It was still creepy.

We haven't been making her wear her AFO as much for the past few days, and the bruises are fading. We'll see if they come back once she has it on for several hours at a time. I hope not, but if they don't, we'll forever be in the dark about where they came from in the first place.

Kids: the mysteries never end!