Today was not a very good day

Yesterday before school I saw Indigo limp, briefly. I thought I had put her shoe on incorrectly (sometimes she curls her toes and the shoe doesn't sit right on her foot), so I took it off and put it back on, and that seemed to help. But after school the limp was back, and much more pronounced. In fact, it was not so much a limp as - a strange stiffness to her gait. She was walking with her right leg out at an angle, with the toes pointed in. Concerned, I called Josh and he came home to take a look. She didn't seem to be in any pain, and did not react when I gently pressed along her leg, rotated her ankle, moved her foot up and down, and bent/extended her knee. There was no swelling or marks of any kind. We decided to let her sleep on it and see how she was the following day.

Today the stiffness/limp seemed a little better in the morning, but it was definitely still present. I took her to school as normal, and talked to the teachers there about whether she had fallen or gotten hurt the previous day. They said that she hadn't, and had in fact been wondering about her limp, and meant to ask me about it. She was crying and clingy this morning, which is unusual for her, so I feared that whatever was wrong with her leg was starting to pain her, even though she wasn't able to really tell me that it was.

I talked to some of the other moms here, and they helped me decide to take her to the children's hospital up the hill. They have a walk-in clinic there, as well as an ER. I tried calling the hospital to figure which I should take Indigo to, but the receptionist spoke only broken english, and I barely any italian, so I decided to wing it. I then did the thing that no one - especially a mom - should ever do, and looked up Indigo's symptoms on the internet, to try to figure out what might be wrong. Maybe it was foolish, but it made me feel better prepared for some of the possibilities. I thought that the most likely culprit was toxic synovitis, which is just a fancy name for hip inflammation that follows a viral infection. Indigo's had a cold for several days, and her symptoms seemed to match up.

Josh and I picked up Indigo after school and rode a taxi to the hospital. We went to the clinic and a pediatrician before being directed to the ER, kindly escorted by a volunteer who spoke excellent english. We were at the hospital for nearly four hours. Her walk had deteriorated - to the point that I was fighting tears whenever she would walk. Her leg was sticking out to the right at an alarming angle, and she had become clumsy, and kept falling down. She was terrified by her examination in the ER, and quite clearly felt some pain when the doctor rotated her hip. She was equally terrified by the ultrasound (and also by that time, exhausted and hungry - the snacks I had brought were not nearly enough).

Turns out my internet sleuthing was right on the money. The doctor's english wasn't perfect, but he essentially said that her hip inflammation was due to a virus. He didn't see signs that anything else was wrong (scarier things like meningitis or bone fractures), and told us to give her ibuprofen for the swelling...and to not let her walk for 5 days. At all. I have no idea how we're going to keep our energetic (and otherwise very healthy) child sitting down for the next 5 days. And I need to find her a pediatrician, to have a follow up appointment next week.

So the upside is, she's fine. It's nothing serious. It was just a terrifying, heartbreaking, exhausting day, and the next bunch of days are going to be a challenge. Poor little girl.