two weeks ago we had the appointment week from hell (meaning not that the appointments were bad, we just had so very many of them). 6 total appointments including one trip to austin. By the end of the week we werent tired of appointments, we were just tired of feedback, if that makes sense. From our observation, therapists typically work from a deficiency perspective...meaning yes your kid has made progress, but now that we're here we still have work to do. And we heard a lot of that that week. Gommy is doing really well, but we want him to do better, which is fine and all, but after a while, feedback just gets old.
so after that we had a good weekend of being outside in the sprinklers, and grilling out, and then we got to this past week. dom's vision screening came back positive--there are no physiological deficiencies. CMV (which caused the PMG) has a knack of damaging the eyes, resulting in scars that limit how well babies can see--but we had none of that. the doctor said that dom had no scarring (YAY!) and that any sight issues he might have are all neurological--meaning that with therapy they can be overcome. he still said that we'd have to do glasses, but let's be honest. i'm blind as a bat and twisty has bad eyes too. glasses were in this kid's future, PMG or not.
so one of the things the doctor told us to do was to take a look at vision therapy as a possibility. so we worked with our case manager, and set up an appointment to have dom evaluated by a vision therapist. we'd also been needing to do an evaluation by a speech therapist, so we decided to do them at the same time (AT THE SAME DAMN TIME? AT THE SAME DAMN TIME!--sorry. that's lyrics from a rap song. my bad).
so we had both therapists at our house, and the first thing that we did was the speech therapy evaluation. the nice lady asked us a ton of questions, observed gommy a little bit...took a few notes...and gave us some information. side note--part of the speech therapy evaluation is based on cognitive skills--meaning can he recognize mommy and daddy, does he react when we're angry etc. so she then told us that 1) he doesnt seem to have any issues feeding, so no need for speech therapy at this point and 2) cognitively he's at about a 7 month level right now, which is just freaking awesome because he's only 8 months old. follow that up with the vision therapist saying that dom seems only slightly behind where he should be but nothing at all to be alarmed about...and twisty and poppa finally got some fantastic news. so much so that mentally, poppa was doing a dance to the following song:
it was a darn good appointment. i think the other best part of the appointment was the therapists and our case manager gushing (i know that's not modest but whatever) about how twisty and i are really doing everything in our power to help our little gommy. i needed to hear that...because this entire time i've been struggling to think about other things that we can be doing. other folks to get involved. to hear someone validate our efforts as being as exhaustive as they can...well that felt good.
so yeah. good appointments. which was then followed up by a good weekend. there's more to detail about other stuff going on in our lives, but i'll do that on a later post.
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