We have closed out upper extremity orthotics and moved down the body into making back braces! The whirlwind of school continues as we fly from one body part to the next; starting with the most simple braces for each part and working our way up in the way of complicated fabrication. So, our first back brace is the Knight Orthosis. Unless you are buying a quick velcro strapped, wrap around, off-the-shelf brace, this is the most basic custom one to get. It involves taking a lot of measurements on your patient and then...metal bending!!! I really have to set my mind to inventing something that bends the metal for me or some sort of material that can be used in orthotics that is an excellent substitute for metal - I would save many students many hours of frustration if I managed that :)
Alas, we still use metal and this project was no different - nothing like showing up to school to pieces of metal sitting on your workbench, ready to be molded and shaped and contoured to someone's body.
I have to say, I was lucky, I was assigned a very easy patient - she was about the same size as me so I just kept trying the pieces on myself to see how I thought they were fitting. The big bands that you see in the picture are the ones that go across the mid-back and the lower-back and are quite flexible, so bending them was not a grueling task. As you can see on my work bench, before we start bending, we draw out a tracing of what we want the metal to be shaped like so as you are bending the metal, you just keep placing it over the tracing to see how close you are and what changes need to be made. Four pieces of metal seemed totally doable for one day and was not all that painful :)
The most difficult part of making this brace so far was matching the back two bars - the paraspinal bars. These are the two thin bars that run up your spinal muscles, on either side of your spinal cord. These bars have to match each other as exactly as possible. You bend one of the bars to match the tracing you have made on your paper and then you have to bend the second bar to match the first bar! I have a hard enough time bending one bar to a tracing, but then having to duplicate it just seems crazy!! My professors have a saying, "sometimes good enough is perfect" and that is what I have to tell myself when trying to bend any two pieces of metal in the exact same shape.
I was able to get all four pieces of metal bent by the end of the day and riveted together to create what is definitely resembling a back brace as this point. The next step is to create lateral bars to go down the midline of the body (from lowest rib to waist) and then add the padding and the corset straps to secure the brace on the abdomen. From straight pieces of metal to a solid frame in one day? I think I can get on board with this back brace thing!
