Thomas is the proud owner of two new pairs of splints, custom-made for him by the nice people at LOC – the London Orthotic Consultancy. They have a great team of people who work together (a gait expert and an orthotics expert) to create something that hopefully will provide him with the stable base he needs to gain confidence in walking.
At the moment, Thomas’s feet aren’t able to give him a firm, stable base (we won’t to go into the details…). These new splints will allow him to have more stability, develop better posture, and establish a good walking gait pattern, and hopefully even help his feet to strengthen and grow in a way that will allow them to work better for him in future.
Over the 3 meetings we had with the LOC team as part of the process, one thing that really struck home is just how complex a matter it is. Provide Thomas with lots of support and it’s great for his stability and posture, but doesn’t help him build his own strength. Too little support and he can build strength, but risks developing bad postural habits. Even that’s a massive oversimplification, so apologies to the LOC team if I haven’t quite said that right!
We got the splints a week ago to try them out, and were back today to have them fine-tuned. After doing so, Thomas got to have a spin in them. This rope idea is genius, and just see how fast Thomas wants to walk whilst holding it! As he gets accustomed to these new splints, who knows what he’ll be able to do in the coming months. Here’s hoping…
I know we’ve said it before, but without the incredible efforts of all our friends & family with our fundraising, we wouldn’t have been able to do this for Thomas.