Therapy, Ann Arbor and an Awesome Big Brother

11 Weeks 1 Day

Last week the Special Ed team came to evaluate Adaline. Most of the session was me signing more paperwork. I don't get that part... I feel like am secretly co-signing on a mortgage or something with all that there is to sign. I don't understand why it is needed. Would someone really call them out to their house then insist they not help their child? One piece of paperwork was to wave a 7 day waiting period in which I could change my mind if I wanted their services or not.  We also learned that special ed follows the school schedule, so they don't work for most of the summer........... I was not pleased to hear this information.
At my prompting however, the PT did do an evaluation and gave me some things to do. She was supposed to meet with us again on Wednesday, but called Sunday night to cancel........
The highlight of this meeting however was when she asked me if I owned a vibrator and she strongly urged me to purchase one if I did not have one. I gave her an "are you really asking me this?" look and she did not flinch. My thoughts turned to me walking into an "adult" store to buy such an item and assuring the cashier that it was for my 2 month old daughter and where their mind would go with that, then to "wait, what on earth is she getting at with this anyways?". I don't remember what lead us to get on the same page, but she was actually talking about a massager. Which as it turns out we do indeed own. We are supposed to put it on her body to help her realize that her limbs belong to her. She also suggested getting scraps of different textured materials to put in her hands. I have taken this a step further and I am working on making her a sensory quilt. Her great grandma has an extensive fabric collection and she let me sift through it for different textures.

Yesterday we got some more fantastic news. It all started with the last early on evaluation. Most of the things the noted her as behind in required her ability to see, so I was concerned that maybe something was wrong with her eyes and I began to start asking questions. A friends sister in-law is an optometrist and she mentioned retinopathy of  prematurity. Prematurity and oxygen use are two risk factors for this issue and she had both, but was never evaluated for it. I called Ryan's optometrist and the suggested an ophthalmologist that they just raved about. They said they were great with kids. We made an appointment and when I showed up it turns out that they share and office with them... which she failed to mention on the phone. The guy didn't really seem like he knew what he was doing with someone her size, but felt that her eyes were hard. He got out a tonometer and said that her eyes also measured high as well. He wanted to dilate her, but said there was a risk of an emergency and said he was unsure if he should do it or not. I asked if we should wait until we could be in a place where the emergency could be handled and he said he was going to send us to U of M. Since my family is awesome, my husband took the day off and my mother-in-law agreed to watch our son and we set off to Ann Arbor. It was actually quite nice to have some time trapped with my husband. We ate at the Blue Tractor. My husband and I spend our third anniversary in Traverse City and we ate at one there. They had 5 kinds of macaroni and cheese on their menu. For those of you that don't know me. I could live on the stuff. I LOVE IT, so when I saw that they had one there, we just had to eat lunch there. This place only had 1 kind and it was not as good as either of us remembered it, but it was still good and enjoyable.
We arrived at the appointment about 20 minutes early. U of M had called the week before to get insurance information, so we didn't have much paperwork to do. They called us back well before our appointment time and did some initial tests. The doctor (who looked younger than me), said she didn't see anything wrong so far, but she wanted to do a complete exam. She put some drops in Adaline's eyes and then sent us back out to the waiting room to wait 30 minutes for her eyes to dilate. We arrived back in the waiting room about 1 minute after our appointment was supposed to start. 2 thumbs up to their time management!! As we watched other patients be called back. I noticed that ALL of the doctors looked like Doogie Howsers to me. I realized this makes me old since people younger than me have had time to get through med school AND because I know who Doogie Howser is. After the full appointment, the doctor explained that Retinopathy of prematurity is much more common in 1 or 2lb babies who needed O2 right away. Since she was almost 5lb and only on O2 2 weeks after birth, she was not at very high risk. She also said that doctors who don't see kids have a hard time getting accurate eye pressure measurements. When you need to hold their eyes open to get a reading, you are putting pressure on the eye and creates a reading that is falsely high. She used a different meter and did not find her pressure to be high. She concluded that she couldn't find anything wrong at all. She wants to see us again in 2-3 months just to make sure because the other doctor was concerned, but she is not concerned. I am going to ask the cardiologist at our appointment tomorrow if we can coordinate the visit with her heart surgery.

For the last part of my post I want to talk about my son who melted my heart today. I am going to bring him with me to her cardiology appointment tomorrow so I was talking to him about it. I told him that sisters heart was broken and that later this summer the doctors were going to fix it, but we needed to go to the doctor a few times before that. We were upstairs and Adaline was doing tummy time. He ran downstairs and got a big heart sticker that he got from daycare on valentines day. He stuck it on her back and said. "I fixed her heart, it's all better now".