Strive OP News

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...

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 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,...