Thursday, June 24, 2010

New Therapists, New Diagnoses

We love watching the show House - we're sort of a mystery diagnosis and crime lab junkie household, even though we don't have cable and don't watch a lot of TV. And since we spend so much time with hospitals and doctors, a lot of the things on House are super funny to us.

In one episode, Dr House says something along the lines of, "pick your specialist, pick your disease" - basically, that a doctor will find something in his or her specialty that matches your symptoms, even if what you really have is an illness that belongs to another specialty.

This week, that's sort of how we're feeling at our house. As I tweeted last night, "my kid's superpower: magically pulling medical conditions out of nowhere." Acorn went to his intake appointment for the new speech therapy program, and came home with 3 new diagnosis codes - oral dysphagia, expressive language disorder, and receptive language disorder.

I still have some issues with that last one, but the therapist assures us it's not as bad as it sounds - she's more concerned that he only follows directions for some people and not others, than about him not actually understanding what's said. I suppose I can go along with that, but I was already wondering how much of what we see is his actual personality, how much is his attempts to exert control over situations, how much is him manipulating people, and how much is actual delay...and this just adds to that feeling.

He ate for her, though obviously not at an age appropriate level - she was pleased, though, with what she saw. We'll be going forward with a combined speech & feeding therapy program, because right now the issues are all somewhat tied together. And I'm hopeful that we'll make progress this way - not that he hasn't been making progress, but that a little faster progress is always nice.

After the fun of speech, we left him at home to meet his new child psychologist, and while there's no diagnosis there...there's agreement that his reactions (over reactions) to doctors offices and the like are, as I put it, "understandable, but not OK."  I'm fully of the belief that there's no need for him to be so anxious about doctors that he makes himself sick or shuts down, and that we should do something about it other than wait and hope it gets better.

If nothing else, having someone with a PhD after their name telling doctors and hospitals that certain things are just not going to fly with Acorn will be a help.

1 comment:

  1. I agree...every time we visit a doctor it's brutal...more diagnoses, more issues, etc.

    Glad you are moving forward. Feeding therapy is so good. He's gonna do great!

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