When does this get easier?

Ever wonder when things are going to start to get easier for your child?  When you’ll be able to go to a session with one of his therapists and not hold your breath throughout waiting for It.  The moment when she says “Oscar is showing so much improvement in X, but we really need to start thinking about Y”.  Where Y is a whole new disorder you’ve heard little of before (mostly because they may have mentioned it to you previously but you refused to believe that this could be an issue too).  So you show the therapist to the door, feed your child, play a bit and put him to bed, and then sink onto your bed with your ever-present laptop to do some online research made possible by g00gle.  What did parents do before g00gle anyway?

So, after reading about Y, you realize, yeah, she might be onto something, so you go to amaz0n and order a bunch of new books for you and the kid.  You’ve been doing this long enough now that you don’t pop for the overnight delivery anymore.  Free supersaver shipping it is.  Nothing these books could offer you in the next couple days is so life-changing that you need to spend the extra $20.  You make sure to add a few toys (educational, of course) to reassure yourself that all is well and everyone does this.  We will eventually own every educational toy manufactured if this keeps up.

Y today was auditory processing disorder.  Auditory processing occurs when your brain recognizes sounds around you and interprets them for you.  The disorder?  That’s when your brain misinterprets the sounds.  Like when you ask your son to “come here” and he looks at you blankly for two minutes before moving toward you or “show me the car” and he shows you the cow because he only heard the hard C.  The rest of the word just evaporated into the air. 

All the while as you’re researching this you’re thinking when is he going to catch a break?  When is something going to come easily to him?  Seriously, he can hear the words but not understand their significance even when he’s paying attention and understands the meanings of the words themselves?  How is it that there is this world full of disorders that you’ve never even thought of until you had a child?  Why is it that the most basic processes are the most complicated to fix when they go awry?  Why aren’t there disorders that can be “cured”?  Can I really not find someone to fix “this”?  Do we really so de-value those with cognitive challenges that there isn’t enough interest or funding to find the “cures” for these disorders? 

And then you just realize that, while you’ll get a second a third opinion, of course, there is a good chance that what the therapist told you is accurate, and that your son may have spent the past two years not understanding a large chunk of what has been said to him or around him.  And you realize that all those times when you were talking with him and he gave you the blank stare and you knew he didn’t understand what you were saying that he really didn’t understand what you were saying.  That it wasn’t a fluke when he scored what he did on the receptive language tests.  And you count the number of months before he’s supposed to start kindergarten and start to panic.  Panic about kindergarten.  And then you wonder whether maybe you should have kept those anti-anxiety meds your doctor gave you. 

All this from a 45 minute “hour” of speech therapy.  Three more sessions to look forward to this week alone.

Since this all seems a little dark and dreary, I thought I’d end with something a bit more upbeat.  A potty-training Oscar riding his tricycle inside the house on a rainy day.  Life isn’t all about cognitive challenges.  Sometimes it’s about a boy riding a bike in nothing but a sweater, leg warmers and shoes.

January 18, 2010 - Posted by Oscar and Etta's mom | Oscar