Surgeons & Therapists (Update)

Joel went back to work yesterday after his kidney stone surgery, and he also had an appointment to get the stent that was placed during surgery in the bladder/kidney passageway removed. That seemed to go fine until he got home and started having terrible kidney stone -esque back pain: Apparently again a misinterpretation of the doctor's words about "some discomfort" for the first 24 hours following the removal of the stent. He seemed to be feeling better this morning and went back to work again.

Ben had his second occupational therapy session and "interpretive results" conference, which was just as I suspected... his fine motor coordination is below average in two out of three measures, and normal in a third. His hand, arm and shoulder strength is also weak which may be an underlying cause of the problem. She recommended two sessions a week because our insurance only covers 60 consecutive days of treatment from the time of the evaluation (don't get me started on that). So far we've got Tuesdays at 9am nailed down but still need to figure out when the second session will be. In today's session he worked on upper body strength (pushing himself down the hallway while lying on a scooter using only his arms), fine motor strength (working a big piece of putty around to find the beads and coins hidden inside - he LOVED this), and fine motor precision (copying shapes on a dry erase board - much more interested in erasing than in drawing).

As a sort of related aside - which I relayed to the OT this morning - Ben brought home a cut out of a turkey the other day. He told me he had asked Spencer to cut it out for him, because he couldn't do it. Spencer had done a fair job, but had accidentally cut the feet off. He also told me he had wanted to color in the whole turkey so that no white was showing, but his hands had gotten tired so he got one of the other kids to finish most of the rest of it for him. Then this morning while struggling to get his gloves on (no it is not cold enough for gloves he just likes wearing them) he commented that his classmate Aaron knows how to do gloves and he asks Aaron help him with his gloves before recess. So apparently he is delegating fine-motor related tasks to other kids at school. The OT had a good laugh over this.