Friday, July 16, 2010

Waiting for the Saebo



For those of you who don't keep up with me on facebook, or on the yahoo group, Blondie is fine. What I thought looked like seizures was actually called clonus - muscle temors. I am so thankful I can't even begin to tell you. We were fortunate..... other families however are not so obviously lucky. My prayers right now are with the Hall familyat http://jessiekelley.blogspot.com/ . Their daughter is a few years from her hemi surgery but has been having facial tics with stomach aches and they are concerned about seizures. If you could add Jessie to your prayer list I know they would be grateful.

A few posts back I shared that we had gone to a Saebo class to see if it was even viable for Blondie to try. It was, so we started the process to purchase one. This is pricey, and of course, not covered by insurance. With the help of grandparents we are now waiting for our very own to come in. Our hope was that it would be here when I was off during the summer, but it isn't looking likely. In the meantime, Blondie's OT made this little brace - used only during OT.... to work on strenthening her thumb. She is able to hold onto the little ball, but always needs her thumb adjusted, so we're moving in that direction and working on her thumb.



I'm wanted to post a video of her exercise, but it isn't great, I'll try again Monday morning. Blondie talks through the whole thing and doesn't seem to be paying much attention. This happens a lot - they will have success with an exercise, show me, I'll run for the camera, and then her muscles fatigue.

What I love about the therapists around Blondie, and I'm sure this is true everywhere, they have a knack for knowing where we want to go, and how to move her there. If we can't have the Saebo right away they will engineer something to help strengthen her hand. We've really been moving toward this for about a year or so. The therapists took the class, and then started building similar equipment to practice on to see if we could get her to this point. I want the muscles in the arm to get stronger to minimize the difference in length between her arms - muscle growth helps bone growth. Everything we do in OT is moving toward that goal.

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