I kept trying to believe it would get better on its own. Johnny was over three years old, and I could still barely understand anything he was saying. But boys' speech develops later than girls, right? And we had a very stressful year with Luke's treatments, so I was sure that explained at least part of it. But when my mother-in-law approached me and told me that one of Johnny's teachers at the preschool (who has experience as a speech therapist) was really feeling like Johnny needed to be evaluated, I knew I could ignore it no longer.
The concern was that Johnny seemed to be regressing in his speech. Words that he had been saying correctly since he was 18 months old were no longer correct. The biggest example being "Papa". Now Johnny said "Apa". Lori, my mother-in-law, had noticed a couple of months earlier that Johnny tended to leave the constants out of his words, which left us with a near unintelligible string of vowels. Because of this regression, I figured the best place to start was with the audiologist, to make sure his hearing was what it should be.
On September 26, we headed to the Primary Children's Rehab office in Bountiful for his hearing test. Johnny was a bit nervous, but he did great! And as it would turn out, his hearing was perfect. Which was a huge relief for me!
That left speech therapy. After our audiology appointment, we were referred to a therapist at the Primary Children's Rehab in Ogden. We met with her for a two hour intake evaluation. What she had to say afterwards was not really what I wanted to hear. She said that Johnny's speech patterns were very strange, and that she would give him a diagnosis of apraxia. That's a motor-planning issue, when the brain knows what it wants to say, but can't get the mouth to form the sounds right. It's correctable, but takes years of speech therapy. And she recommended two to three times a week. I was completely overwhelmed! I cried the whole way home. It sounds stupid, but I was so upset that Johnny wasn't my perfect little boy anymore. I was so tired of hearing diagnoses, and talking about treatments. What was wrong with me that my girls were fine, but my boys had problems? Remember, I'm a pretty exhausted Mom these days, so my thinkin' ain't so clear sometimes. :) Of course, we were going to do whatever it took to get Johnny's speech where it should be...especially before kindergarten. And since we were thinking about getting Luke back into physical therapy, we figured we'd just take the boys together. We decided we could only handle it once a week, though. That was just going to have to be enough.
Because of our schedule, we ended up working with a different therapist for Johnny than the one that did the intake eval. Her name is Erin, and we love her! She works so well with Johnny, keeping the balance between fun and work. And she helped me feel so much better about what we were dealing with. She said that Johnny has apraxic tendencies, but that classic apraxia is much worse than what Johnny is dealing with. She thought once a week would be sufficient, and that we'd get Johnny improving in no time. And she's been right! He's been in therapy for a few months now, and we can all notice a real difference.
This whole being a parent thing isn't always what you expect it to be. Do I wish that we weren't dealing with this? Absolutely! But we are, and Johnny is definitely worth the trouble. :) Before I know it, he'll be mouthing off and I won't have any problem understanding what he's saying. Yeah...let's work towards that! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment