We popped into Sick Kids yesterday so Jon could get checked over by Dr. Unni.

Jon’s right leg has healed nicely. Both the break and the “stress fracture” — the hole where the old bottom screw was — are mere wisps on an x-ray.

So we moved on to planning for the next surgery, the left hip, in the spring. Everything from potential blood loss (low risk) to post-op casting (none, but he will have a knee immobilizer and some kind of removable foam wedge to keep his legs spread).

We had talked about removing the hardware from his right leg, but Dr. Unni now thinks it’d be best not to. From my perspective, this would make him more portable, since I have to carry him Gone with the Wind style; if both hips were done at the same time, how would I carry him?

It does mean that we carry the same risk as before: if the hardware moves, we could have another break. So it will have to be watched. I understand the doctor’s concerns: an extra surgical procedure, extra source of infection, extra bleeding (scar tissue bleeds more than “fresh” tissue). And maybe for nothing. He reiterated that in most kids, the hardware does not migrate to a bad place. So we’ll watch and wait.

And in the meantime, we fix the other hip this spring. Lately, in our physiotherapy, Jon’s left leg has been disengaging, dropping him to the floor. We’re not surgery junkies. It needs to be done.

So the Cars DVD came out yesterday, and Jon was delighted to watch it, until the dreaded THX logo came up.

Sigh. Jon used to have no problem with the THX logo and creepy sound on video. But come his first trip to the movie theatre and, with his anxiety already high, they had one of the jokier versions where the little man adds a cow “moooo” toy to the logo, making it sound like an entire herd. Jon’s vision (much more limited back then) shut down, and the surround-sound lowing made him want to join the stampede.

Since then he’s been able to tolerate it in the theatres, but he goes wide-eyed and avoids certain Pixar movies in his DVD collection because of the brief appearance of the logo at the beginning. (The earlier DVD’s also made it so you couldn’t chapter skip from it).

Because it’s not rational, when it plays he freezes, and can’t use his many abilities with multiple remotes to mute/fast forward past the obstacle. Afterwards he’s stunned and takes a while to come out of it. Poor Jon.

How do we reduce the fear?