Strive OP News

You’re scrolling through photos from the playgroup. Your friend’s baby, same age as yours, give or take a week, has a head as round as a grapefruit. Then you look at your own baby, at that flat spot on the back of the head you’ve been staring at for weeks, and the question shows up before you can stop it.

Did I do this?

Let’s sit with that question for a minute,...

Every October, millions of parents go through the same ritual. They stand in a costume aisle under fluorescent lights, holding a tiny dinosaur suit in one hand and a tiny pumpkin suit in the other, trying to figure out which one their baby will tolerate for more than four minutes.

The hat is always the problem. Babies hate hats. Babies treat hats the way cats treat bath time. You put it...

Jenna Kowalski has a list on her phone. It started as three questions. By the time she backed out of her driveway in Royal Oak and pointed the minivan up I-75 toward the Strive OP clinic in Sterling Heights, it had grown to eleven.

Her son Theo is four. He was born with a brachial plexus injury on his right side, and his occupational therapist has been working with him since...

It is 2:07 a.m. in Royal Oak, and the only light in the nursery is a phone screen.

The baby finally went down. She came home from the NICU five weeks ago, after a long stretch of beeping monitors, feeding logs, and nurses who learned her moods before her parents did. Now her mom stands over the crib, looking at the back of that tiny head and noticing something she can’t...

A parent in Sterling Heights sits in an exam room on a Tuesday afternoon. The appointment has gone well enough. The clinician was kind. Then, in about ninety seconds, three sets of initials go by: AFO, KAFO, HKAFO.

The parent nods. The parents write them down. And the parent drives home on Van Dyke with no clear idea what any of them mean.

That happens every day in Shelby Township, Warren, Royal...

Is My Child’s Toe Walking Normal? What an Orthotist Looks For, and What Happens Next

It’s 11:47 p.m. The house in Shelby Township is finally quiet. And a mom is sitting on the edge of the bed, phone glowing, typing the same question she’s typed a dozen times before.

“Is my child’s toe walking normal?”

She’s seen it for months. Her son pads down the hallway on the balls of his feet, heels...

She noticed it the way mothers notice everything, which is to say, almost by accident.

It was a Tuesday morning well-baby checkup in Royal Oak. The kind of appointment you pencil in between grocery runs and nap schedules. The kind where you expect to hear that everything looks great, your baby’s gaining weight, see you in two months. But the pediatrician did something that shifted the air in the room. She...

Your baby’s been prescribed a cranial helmet, and the clinical side makes sense. But now a different set of questions takes over. Will it hurt? Can they sleep in it? What happens at daycare? These are the questions that keep parents up at night, and they deserve straight answers.

That’s exactly what Episode 2 of Ask the Orthotist covers. A credentialed orthotist from Strive Orthotics & Prosthetics walks through the everyday...

She was three weeks old, and she hated it.

Face down on a play mat, fists clenched, cheeks flushed, letting out the kind of wail that makes new parents want to scoop her up and never try this again. Her mother almost did. Almost.

But she didn’t. She got down on the floor instead, nose to nose with her daughter, and started singing. Thirty seconds later,...

It is 2:14 a.m. in Sterling Heights and the baby monitor is glowing green on the nightstand. The house is quiet. The furnace has cycled off. And a mother is lying flat on her back with her eyes open, doing the thing that nobody warned her about, which is listening.

Not for crying. For breathing.

Her son is eleven weeks into cranial helmet therapy for plagiocephaly, and the helmet has been on...