New Sadie News

Our girl is walking like a champ! We saw Dr. Puri today (it has been almost 4 months since our last visit) and his exact words were, "I am pleasantly surprised with her outcomes and all of the progress she is making." I was so happy to hear him say that and now I completely believe that only God knows our true diagnosis for the future. Thank you Lord! Sadie is almost 6 months seizure-free! Since our last visit with Puri we had discussed her lack of speech development and therefore had started the necessary paperwork for Sadie to be evaluated at the Weiskopf Center in Louisville. However, with Sadie's new health insurance we would have to pay 100% there, so we are now looking into going to the Riley Center in Indianapolis. Dr. Puri says the tests and evalutions at Riley would be the same as at the Weiskopf, we just have a longer drive now. So, we are still planning on having her evaluated sometime this summer to hopefully give us some insight to her lack of language development. On that same note, she is starting to make more sounds and even blend two to three sounds together, and just this past week she started saying " Bye-Bye" ( its usually not at appropriate times, but for her to put vowels and consonants together is a big step) As far as Sadie responding to sound, she responds to sound perfectly now, nothing like before. She is well aware of the noisy world around her and reacts to it like any other toddler. Her speech therapist is great and she is planning on having another opening in her schedule in June, so at that time Sadie is suppose to get an additional hour per week. Sadie has only been in the recovery/healing stage for about 6 months and has only been involved in therapy for 4 months, so we tend to rush things and expect too much too soon, the reason being because we have seen tremendous gains in all the other therapies with Sadie. She is even able to meet some goals for her age and with the other skills and goals she is only 3-5 months behind. Her therapists comment all the time at how stunned they are of Sadies achievements compared to the Sadie they first saw back in January. So overall everyone is so excited with Sadie and what she is doing. Dr. Puri reminded me that the one common characteristic with all of his patients who have experienced neurological trama, is a language development delay, so for now we are going to celebrate what Sadie is doing and continue to work on the language. He had mentioned an "auditory processing disorder" at our last visit, he didn't use those exact words this time, (only because I think Sadie has to be officially and thoroughly evaluated before she can be medically labeled that) but I do still think that that is what he is thinking. I asked him if he had any advice on how to help her language development. He said, "You are already doing it". He said that with Sadie in therapy and with all that we surround her with at home and at daycare, she is getting plenty of language learning exposure. So now we just wait. As far as her motor skills, she is outstanding! We are still working on a few things, but for the most part, she is taking on every new challenge. Her physical therapist told me last week, that she won't be with Sadie much longer (maybe another month or two) because she is meeting all of her goals at such a fast rate. She did however fit Sadie for her left leg brace a few weeks ago and so now she wears it during all of her waking hours. ( I know she's not wearing it here, this was after bath and right before bed) She is suppose to wear it due to her left side weakness and we can already see the improvement in her steps. She will only need to wear it for about 5-6 months. She is using her left hand more and more too, almost as equally as her right. I would estimate a 40 to 60 ratio compared to a 10 to 90 just 4 months ago. Her First Steps therapists are the ultimate "A Team" I owe them so much! Thank you to you too Danielle! Dr. Puri also said we can start weaning another medication. So by early June we will be down to only two meds a day. That is great news! Some other minor issues we discussed were Sadies allergies, which cause her to mouth breath a lot! So we may venture into a discussion about an adenoidectomy and a sleep study which we were planning on doing before but never did. Another issue was Sadie's left eye. Dr. Puri noticed a slight exotropia with it (lazy eye) so now we will be scheduling a visit with his referred opthomalogist. Dr. Puri says that this can be easily corrected. We also had some blood drawn today just to do a global check for genetic testing. This was something I had mentioned since it was mentioned to me in Cleveland several months ago, and Dr. Puri agreed. So since he couldn't find it in her chart (because he thought she had already had it done) he sent us to lab to have it drawn. We will have the results in 5 weeks. We both feel that there will be no negative results, however with a child who has experienced a seizure disorder this test is very common. Overall, the checkup was a very good one and as he expressed his happiness with Sadie he said, "See you in 4 months"