Annabelle's strength is amazing too, so is how she is moving through therapy. Actual sessions are another story... she's still her stubborn and difficult self when we go in which is very frustrating. Despite that, both her PT's think she has met or surpassed many of the goals we had for her and that she is already a little bit past her previous baseline. In the past ~2 weeks she has started to go up the stairs alternating legs without holding onto anything, makes me nervous but it's awesome! She is strengthening her calf muscle and doing some excellent focused dorsiflexion (toes to the nose) which we started to incorporate into stretches. This has carried over into her walk where she is getting her toes up more when she brings lefty leg forward in her gait and is dragging the toe on the ground much less. Her jumping evenly with both legs is great- up, forward and working on jumping off a small step. Her squat jumps are better than mine too!
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| Squat jumps! |
At this point we are planning on working on plantarflexion (toes down/ tippy toes) which she has hardly ever done. I can remember a few times she would go on her tippy toes to get stuff out of her reach pre-surgery but have not noticed any of that since. Right now if we try to have her move her toes down to touch my finger she can't do it and will just straighten her entire leg out. The more we strengthen that dorsi and plantar flexion the less we should see her ankle inverting and collapsing in and we should see her gait just keep improving. We are also going to be working on general balance, yesterday we had her stand with lefty up on a step and she is just so used to using and focusing on her right side that she struggles to not fall over.
Even with working on all this stuff she is progressing so well PT thinks that after March we can drop down to one PT session per week and continue regular work from home which is just 3mos out from surgery!
Unfortunately, OT has remained pretty stable. We have not seen a big increase in lefty hand use after the surgery but I'm hopeful once PT simmers a bit we will see jump in function. She is slowly but surely increasing lefty use as an assist and is getting better at isolating fingers. Our main focus right now is fine motor, mostly pincer grasp with her "pinchies" which is also slowly but surely improving. We also went back to more "activities of daily living" kind of stuff like dressing and buttons to start getting ready for kindergarten....
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| Improving finger isolation and teaching Lefty how to sign "I Love You" |
HOLY SHIT! KINDERGARTEN?!?!?! Man that was fast, we still have a year :-) but that is a whole 'nother ball of wax with what school to go to, IEP/504, what will or won't she qualify for.... She has not been in our Early learning program/ SpEd preschool since we are doing so many private therapies so we will be starting from scratch. I have a hard time thinking about it but we will be starting our research in the next few months. One step at a time, right?
Finally, we have eye surgery today. It's pretty sad when with all she has had done the eye surgery has been a blip on our radar and we even forgot about it for a little while. Just the other day Jim and I were trying to figure out which therapy we had today and were so confused when there was nothing on our therapy print out.... "ooooh yeeeeah, surgery". Not looking forward to dealing with post-sedation Annabelle again but at least there are post-sedation pancakes involved!
1.5 months post-SDR, doing well with peddling on her own and quad strength
Just need to work on that steering!
