Day One - Evaluation & Preliminary Therapy

Day one is complete. It has been a crazy 24 hours. Lots of packing and running out the door to hit the road in enough time to make it to our hotel before late and dealing with some wacky road construction that had us taking alternate routes. Sometimes GPS can really mess you up more than help you! Then it was a VERY early morning to get everyone dressed and ready so we could guarantee a good breakfast and make it to the location by 9am. With that in mind, I must backtrack for a moment and mention that God has already been all over this journey. The prayers of our church family have been ever present with us. We also waited to the last minute to book our hotel and ran into some major price hikes due to SOMETHING that was taking place in the area. We had to search a while for alternate hotels and came upon Habitat Suites. The price was right (which is actually pretty crazy for what is included) and the accommodations have been excellent! The Hotel is "green", so aside from the fact that we have a bed and pull out couch for the kids, we also have a small kitchen. The morning continental breakfast includes organic free range eggs, local honey, turkey sausage (as well as vegan sausage...but was probably soy, so we don't eat that), fair trade coffee, and other VERY healthy options. They also promote the greenery that is grown on their property that are available for you to take with you, including different herbs and spices. To many people, all of this is a perk, but for ME, this is a necessity. I NEED the organic options to feel at my best and avoiding flaring. I am always wondering how I will handle food when we travel. What a load off of my mind! PLUS, my family is benefiting instead of slacking on our trip.

So, back to our day. After a great breakfast, we headed to our practitioners location. Upon arrival the craziness continued with the kids bouncing off the walls, but this is craziness we are used to and actually so is our practitioner! It didn't phase her a bit. In fact, she told us Rookie is tame compared to other kids she has worked with. After a bit of small talk to go over some of our paperwork, it was time to begin. We decided to have Robby stay with him and I would wrangle the other two. Thankfully it was a beautiful day, so we played around outside for a couple of hours. The plan was to do an evaluation of him and then begin the preliminary groundwork of his therapy. She did prepare us for what he may exhibit after this 1st day is over. He may either be 10x worse or simply crash out and sleep. It just depends on how his brain reacts to the reorganizing.

At about 11:00p Robby came to the car where I had the other two quarantined for a snack and told me they were done! An hour earlier than we had expected. I went in to talk to her about the session. They stopped because his brain was simply tired, but they would try to go longer tomorrow. She was impressed with how well he complied to the therapy. She was also very happy with the diet we have been exposing him to and agreed with our desire to try to get more quality protein in him too.

THE EVALUATION RESULTS
I don't have all of the paperwork to give you a detailed lowdown of what we discovered like I have with his Neurodevelopmental Evaluations, but I can try to explain what I remember. The type of evaluation is nothing new to us. It involves muscle testing. This is something I am used to since this is what I have done for years while trying to help my arthritis. If you are unfamiliar with this, it can seem a little weird. What she found was that Rookie was very weak with the brain transferring information from one side to the other. He was much stronger from front to back. This means that he was very in tune to taking in visual information, but once it gets in, he can't process it to get back out. There were also two tests that she did that indicated he was only processing at 20-30%. While doing this testing, she performed pressure points and exercises that caused the brain to switch on and function at 100%. I am limited in the amount of knowledge I have at this point because I have nothing to refer to AND I wasn't in the room with Robby during the evaluation, so hopefully I will have more to share as the week progresses. Right now, he is crashed out! Thank goodness we have had THAT response so far! Tomorrow we will be hoping to get in 4 hours of therapy. With that in mind we will probably be resting up to get ready for another brain draining day!