Okay…so I’m writing a story featuring a very unlucky boy who was born with a lot of disabilities. One of the things I want him to suffer from is some sort of orthopedic problem that makes him need to wear leg braces and walk with crutches.
Now, for some reason, my usually keen google-fu is failing me on this issue, on two fronts. First of all, I am having trouble finding a decent, information-rich listing or grouping of information about orthopedic problems in infants, so I can choose the disorder/problem I want him to have. Secondly, when I search for leg braces to get an idea of what his braces would look like, I end up getting a lot of sites that sell the sort of braces one might wear after athletic injury or knee surgery, and a weirdly large number of sites that sell old-style leg braces, like the kind that polio victims used to wear, to people who find them sexually interesting. Now, those old-style leg braces are visually interesting, but are they really used anymore for real medical problems? If they’re not, where can I see pictures of kids wearing the kind that are really used today?
The problem may be that very few infants are braced anymore. The conventional wisdom of today (which is different from even 20 years ago) is to let the child grow a bit and see if the condition corrects itself. Things that might have gotten you braced before (hip dysplasia, bowlegs, knocknees, supination or pronation of the feet, etc.) might get nothing at all until school age now. 90+% of these things resolve spontaneously.
CP might work. Spastic diplegia is a particular form of Cerebral Palsy which affects the lower extremities more than the upper. It’s generally non-progressive, which means it won’t get any worse, and eventually most people who have it learn to walk, although maybe not as smoothly as the unaffected. A severe case might call for bracing.
Given the circumstances of his birth, he could definitely plausibly have CP. I’m a little disappointed at how boring the modern leg braces look, but I am glad to know for accuracy’s sake.
