Braces

I used braces for the first time a few days ago. I had met with my orthotist earlier and we agreed to meet with my physical therapist to try some loaner braces. We met later with the physical therapist in the gym at Harborview hospital. There are two kinds of braces that we were considering. KAFO which stands for knee ankle foot straps onto your leg whereas RGO is more rigid and includes a strap on your back. The orthotist brought a loaner pair of KAFO braces. The only RGO brace that she brought was designed for a small child. We strapped on the braces and move to a set of parallel bars.

The braces have two modes, in one mode they knee swings freely allowing you to sit in a wheelchair, in the other mode the knees are locked and rigid. To stand up you need to put your legs straight out, lock the knees and then somehow get to a standing position with your body over your feet. The parallel bars help a lot but it is still not very easy.

As you can see there are tricks to standing up. Once standing the trick is to position your body over the legs which requires a lot of difficult movement in a back with a lot of hardware.

In the end both the orthotist and the physical therapist thought in view of my back I would be better off with the more rigid RGO braces (the kind I didn't try). It will take a couple of weeks to meet the orthotist for casting and a few weeks more to make the brace.