Walker Fever

More fun with family. After a few more rounds of slapping the table, Noa was ready to show off her walker skills. As you can see, she really is doing all the work herself - we stay close but we don't have to spot her hands-on-the-walker like we used to. We actually stood by herself for a long few seconds yesterday, but ofcourse didn't have a video camera. The great thing was that she was really trying to find her balance and didn't just turn into a plank and fall over like she used to. Sometimes she stands on her own when I'm putting on her coat, or she is pulling up her pants, only she doesn't really realize she is doing it. So I think she is getting close - her body is starting to find this upright thing to be somewhat natural.

In other - though similar news - just sharing some of the hard truth of the Land of Noa, I went to the doctor last week (after weeks of pain in my shoulder, that is frankly not unusual but it has escalated to the point where I knew Alieve wasn't going to do it any more). The doctor believes I have "Thorasic Outlet Syndrome" (I'll have some tests next week to confirm that). This is a condition in which those muscle between your arm socket and your neck become compressed, potentially cutting off nerves and arteries. In fact when he lifted my arm above my head, it completely cut off my pulse and my hand started to go numb immediately. He gave me a couple of meds (one for pain, one for the nerve which I can only take at night as it's quite trippy) and perscribed PT.

THE NEXT DAY, because my stomach had been acting funny, I went to my GP. I had actually already googled enough to suspect I had an ulcer and as it turns out I was right. Probably from all those Alieve (he did yet another test to see if it was the Alieve or something else). And then of course had to change all the med's that the other doctor had given me because they were all aggrevating the ulcer.

SO, getting Noa walking would be grand, just grand. I actually think the stress on my shoulder on neck is less about the carrying, and more about the way she sometimes pulls on me when she is walking while holding my hands. But I'm sure it's a combination of both. You have to get in some pretty crummy positions to lug her around and she's closing in on 38 or 40 pounds at this point.