The busy weekend that was

The weekend flew past and seemed much too short as usual, the winter tyres are still on the car, the lawn has not been cut and the cardboard boxes are still in the basement. I did however manage to get 2 hours cycling in on Saturday in the sunshine before we went to Copenhagen for a birthday party. Unusually I was given the opportunity to feel linguistically able for one of the first times in my life as the party took place in English, French and Danish and I could understand almost all of it!

Sunday mornings bike ride was scuppered when I decided to have a look at a dripping tap in the basement. The warn washer in the tap fell apart in my hands and I was left with no washer and no open shops. Time to improvise! I successfully managed to make a washer from a piece of rubber that I found in the car park of the closed DIY shop and fix the dripping tap. I must admit to feeling a level of smug self-satisfaction, hitherto only experienced by Micheal Howard

On Sunday afternoon we piled into the van again and went to Copenhagen to visit some "new friends". I sparked a wave of controversy last week when I mentioned out plans to interview new friends, but I can now announce both the reasons and the results on the interview. Firstly they were very nice people and were watching the Paris - Roubaix bike race when we got there so I didn't have to miss yet another exciting bike race, secondly they were very helpful and informative on the subject of club feet and treatment in Denmark.

When we had the second scan done on our unborn child at about 20 weeks into the pregnancy, the doctors could see that it has 2 club feet and will need to have some treatment to correct that in the first years of his life. We of course went home and began researching how this correction is done and it turns out that there are several methods that can be sued. The most popular these days being a non surgical method know as the Ponseti method. Using this method, Dr Ponseti has a 98% success rate in correcting club feet and because he doesn't perform surgery, the long term results are very good. This is because the scar tissue resulting from surgery causes problems in later life. The Ponseti method uses a series of plaster casts over a couple of months from shortly after birth and continues with wearing braces for a couple of years, latterly only when asleep.

This is where things get complicated. The doctors in Denmark don't see many babies with clubfoot as it only affects 1 in1000 births. The Ponseti method is used, but apparently not well and the success rate is 60% so we have been researching our options. The people we met on Sunday have just come home from the US having gone there when the Danish doctors couldn't fix their babies foot and decided that they couldn't do any more to help without surgery. Doctor Ponseti (who is now 93) offers free treatment to anyone with club foot who goes to Iowa and has already told us that "To my knowledge there are no doctors successfully using the Ponseti technique in Denmark". We are investigating other options in Europe, but at the moment it looks like we will be spending a month or so in Iowa this summer...