Kaitlyn's developmental pediatrician appt is coming up in about 2 weeks. She has shown a tremendous amount of improvement in the last month, so Mike and I are wondering if we should keep the appointment. If insurance was paying, this would be a no-brainer. What's to lose? Well, the doctor we've selected (who came highly recommended) isn't in our insurance network, so we're looking to pay for this out of pocket. It's very expensive. Hind sight being 20/20 and knowing that we're teetering on the brink of cancellation now, I wish I had picked a different a doctor who was in our network so at least she could see someone and either confirm or deny our thoughts. And we probably will still do that, but we expect another several month wait to get seen. (The doctor we currently are scheduled to see took 4 months to get this appointment.) I, however, don't want to make a decision as important as this one strictly based on finances. Kaitlyn is worth every penny, and I hate to think about losing precious time if there is something wrong. Ahhh...parenthood.
Anyway, here's the update on Kaitlyn which is why we're thinking about not going now.
Ever since the "plauge" hit our house with the stomach bug, Kaitlyn did almost a solid week of nothing but cuddling. So, since she's recovered from that, her stimming/bouncing has greatly decreased. She still does it, but not as often. So, I would think a decrease in that behavior is good. I'd be even happier if she didn't do it at all of course, but I'm looking at baby steps here. :-)
Second, her vocabulary is exploding. Just being able to say words doesn't mean she's not autistic though, so again, I'm at a cross roads. Her current words include:
-Hi MaMa
-Hi DaDa
-She has a version of her own name, Kaitlyn (sounds pretty close too)
-book
-train (and choo choo)
-duckie
-elephant (wow, that's a big one...GO KAITLYN)
-aligator (another big word!!!)
-nana (banana)
-light
-more (and she signs it at the same time)
-cookie
-milk
-plane
-daisy (both for our dog and the Disney character)
-donald
-goofy
-ball
-baby
-earring
-ear
-eye
-mouth
-hat
-she still does all of her animal sounds (bee, owl, horse, lion, snake)
-and she tries to sing along to words of songs where she can as well as chimes in when we count from 1-10 for the numbers she knows
-there are several more....
OK, so yes, she's "talking." And it's not just when she's watching certain videos. She will go over to her toy shelves and point up at the books and say "book." She will see a banana on the kitchen counter and say "nana." She will look up in the sky and say "plane"...sometimes there isn't actually a plane up there, but hey, I guess she thinks there should be. So, we've got pointing in conjunction with words which I know to be good from an autistic perspective too.
However, I have a co-worker who has an autistic son. I was sharing with her this morning that we might want to cancel, and she was excited for us. She is, however, trying to help too. So, she just mentioned to us that when her son was diagnosed at 25 months that he had 111 words, would point off and on, etc... So, I guess the moral of her story was that just because a kid talks and points doesn't mean that enough progress has been made to rule out autism. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was simply thinking, hey, she's talking. Something must be going right. To hear her story with her son gives me pause again about what to do with this appointment. Kaitlyn does not have many of the autism red flags (she makes eye contact, she points, she's talking more, she doesn't have sensory issues), but that doesn't/couldn't mean that she still wouldn't be somewhere on the spectrum toward the mild end. AAAAHHHHHHHH!!! I reiterate...parenthood. This is tough.
Help...what should we do?
No comments:
Post a Comment