Plagiocephaly

Sharing all of your personal life for someone to read is sometimes hard. I’ve always been open about our infertility journey. I knew at times that people wouldn’t agree to what we were doing, or even how I viewed things. Although most of our feedback was positive thoughts, prayers & support, we did receive somenegative comments along the way. For the most part, I was always able to look past the negative. However those comments were about ME…it’s easy to look beyond and ignore harsh statements when they are about you. But what if they are about your baby?

That’s where I am now. I’ve gone back and forth about sharing this information,should I or should I not? What if people talk about him or make rude comments…I can handle someone talking about me, but I don’t think I will be able to if someone talks about my child. (honestly I don’t think anyone will, but I do know from experience there are very opinionated people out there, and when you put your information out there for the world to read you have to accept that not everyone will agree with your choices…again, we’ve always received so much love from everyone with very little negative feedback-but we know it ‘could’ happen…and that’s where I, as any parent, just want to protect my child from any harm.)

So with that said—

Miles has Plagiocephaly. There are three types of Plagiocephaly-Miles’s has the brachycephaly type, where the back of his head is flat and he’ll most likely have to wear a ‘band’ (which is a baby helmet). Miles had a small flat spot when he was born due to how he was sitting in the womb, which gradually got worse while he slept through the night (he wouldn’t sleep on his side or with his head turned-he loves sleeping with his face straight up and hands behind his head)….we didn’t notice just how bad the flatness was until he started losing his hair.

A baby’s skull is so soft and malleable until the sutures fuse around two years of age. For this reason, any external forces, whether during the pregnancy or in the infant’s daily life, can contribute to the head shape. The good news is that the shape can be redirected into a normal head shape using a Band. If untreated he could have a flatter head than normal, he could be at a great risk for ear infections and this could affect his vision later on down the road.

When I heard that he will most likely have to wear a band I cried…a lot!! It took me a couple days to realize MY BABY IS FINE. This does NOT affect his brain by any means. When someone tells you something about your child it’s devastating…and of course the first thing I could think of was his brain and his life. I wasn’t very educated on Plagiocephaly and what all it entailed. I knew the importance of tummy time and rotating your baby, but never knew the details or even thought about the possibility of having Plagiocephaly. This was never mentioned to us, and honestly in the baby books (all the baby books) I’ve read there wasn’t a big topic on it. I’ve carried a lot of guilt; I’ve always put Miles on his stomach supervised for tummy time even though he hates every minute of it, but did I do it enough? Should I have rotated him more than I did? Was this something I could have prevented or fixed? It took a lot of convincing from his doctor and a lot of researching for me to realize I could nothave prevented this—and even though I know in my heart this is NOT ‘our fault’ I am still for some reason carrying guilt. This is just the shape his skull wanted to grow—would it be as bad as it is if SIDS didn’t recommend back sleeping, probably not, but when you look at the bigger picture I CAN fix his head, I can’t bring him back to life. Would I change anything…NO!

One of the hardest parts of all of this was accepting that we as parents didn’t do anything wrong, that he IS ok, and that unfortunately there are going to be opinionated judgmental people out there who will stare and will make comments(although he is just a baby and I don’t understand how anyone could—we are aware this could happen). This band willnot hurt him, yes there is a small percentage of babies with bands that have reactions or get a rash from it, but it’s nothing serious-- most babies don’t even know they have it on…and there is a chance he might NOT have to have it at all—however we are fairly certain he will.

We will go to see a specialist at Cranial Technologies soon to get him scanned and to access the severity of his skull—they will let us know if he has to even have a band or if this will fix on it’s on with time—if he does which type of band will he have and how long will he have to wear it for. 

We are beyond grateful nothing is ‘seriously’ wrong with our son, this is fixable. But any kind of bump in the path is hard—especially when you are uneducated-the unknown can be scary! But just like anything else we have gone through-we will get through this. We have a perfectly healthy baby boy who willpossibly be rockin’ an adorable little band soon. :)