Progress?

Yesterday, Therapist lady from OTA called to begin our listening therapy process. She asked all sorts of questions about Firstborn's progress with sensory stuff. For the most part, he seems to be at the same spot with all aspects of SI as he was at the end of the summer. He took on ground with his ability to follow verbal directions in that he can now place his hands in various positions based on verbal directions, but the rest of his body is useless. He still can't do reading comprehension tests well when the teacher talks incessantly about the passage. He still has problems transitioning from something he likes to something he doesn't like. He still breaks into tears for things that he probably should be able to handle. He still gets confused with complex directions. He has learned that he doesn't listen as well as his peers though, and he is beginning to formulate a plan for taking responsibility for his own listening. This is major. Not only does this give him the right to ask for repetition, but it also gives him the understanding of why he needs to do this therapy and why he needs to work harder at listening than his peers. While they goof off in class, he has to pay attention.

So, next step is an baseline listening test that should probably cost us about 300-500 smackers. Eek. By waiting so long, we have introduced yet another expense. However, this expense might also help us get him classroom modifications in the public school, so maybe it's worth the money? Also by waiting, the Advanced Brain company has come out with a less expensive Listening Program that will cost us about 175 less than it did last summer.

Therapist Lady has been kind enough to clarify for me that the testing he went through is not auditory processing testing. That type of testing is not done by therapists. What she does is testing that provides a baseline prelistening so we can compare it to postlistening results. The Listening Test is a Tomatis based listening test... very different from an audiogram.

From my experience having Ken tested for Central Auditory Processing Disorder at Children's Hospital and from reading When the Brain Can't Hear, many of the tests that Therapist Lady did with Firstborn were very similar to the ones done for Central Auditory Processing testing. The CAPD testing however was done by an audiologist at children's and contained many more tests than the ones done by therapist Lady at OTA. Also, one would consider that the diagnosis that the audiologist would be able to glean from the testing would be somewhat different and maybe wider in scope. Therapist Lady was looking specifically at what these tests can tell her about Firstborn's progress using TLP. The audiologist would be looking at a wider array of tests that could tell her all sorts of things about how Firstborn's brain handles auditory information and how it would affect all areas of his life.

In the end, we were not able to get a diagnosis out of the CAPD testing because Firstborn was too young (1 month shy of 7 which is the cutoff for who they will test) and because his speech difficulties made him unintelligible by the audiologist and his sensory integration issues made it very difficult for him to handle having tubes in his ears (used instead of muffs for all of the auditory input).

This result created the catch 22 we are in. We can't get him CAPD testing because of speech problems but the school says his speech is just fine and he doesn't have SI issues but the school says that he has none and besides they would recognize DSI as a diagnosis alone anyway, and by the way, they won't recognize a auditory processing diagnosis unless it's from an audiologist anyway. But the audiologist can't get a test out of him because of the speech and SI issues that we can't remediate through the school because they don't exist. and on and on.

So our hopes are on TLP. And Therapist Lady has been wonderful about providing us with other options to see if we can get further support from the school or further diagnosis without breaking the bank because all of this stuff is very expensive.

So we will see where we end up and let you all know of the progress.