Hello all, sorry it’s so long in-between updates Arianna hasn’t had much therapy since the last update.
She has started speech therapy a couple of weeks ago. We are really excited about her ST she comes to the house once a week and she is awesome. We were trying to figure out how we could get Ari to Orlando every week to see Debra Beckman and Ari’s new ST Mrs. Dee has been trained in the Beckman oral motor technique . Mrs. Dee is wonderful with Ari and has already taught me some new things to do with her to help get her eating more and to try and get Ari to talk.
We went to Shriners a few weeks ago to fit Ari for another stander, we did this last year and Medicaid didn’t want to pay for it because Ari needs a special head rest to help hold her head up (she tends to let her head fall off to the left side) and after a year and a half of trying to get them to understand why she needed the headrest they said that it had been to long and we needed to retry her in more standers again and take new measurements, so please pray that they will approve this new stander quickly. Ari really needs this to help get her weight barring on her legs. We are suppose to go back to Shriners tomorrow to get her hip and spine x-rayed and check her feet splints and get any changes to her wheelchair but Ari has a cold right now so we are probably going to have to reschedule it.
Ari has also started OT last week. And will be seeing him three times a week. He just moved to town a little while ago and he has a lot of anoxic brain injury experience and has worked with a lot of near drowning kiddos. He has developed his own technique he calls the mason jar technique , I am not sure what it is other than he is stretching her whole body a lot different than I have ever been taught and putting pressure on certain muscles at the same time. Ari seems to really like him and is responding well to whatever it is that he is doing. She seems to be holding her head up more and for longer periods at a time already. We are really excited about having someone with so much experience in her type of brain injury move to our little town and can’t wait to see what kind of result he gets with her.
She has continued her PT with Ms. Lana in Lake Placid and also been going to her KI method treatments every week. We are going to start trying to do more KI method Treatments everyday with us doing them everyday so that we will see more results quicker. She is also still on the brain protocol we got from Center IMT and is doing well with that. And we are going to Jacksonville once a month to check the protocol and get her IMT treatments as well as me doing them at home.
We had a birthday party for Ari her birthday was June 25th, This year she was able to eat some of her cake and not just the frosting YEAH ARI! I am posting some pics from her party and the others I promised in the last updates. Bernie was able to get the pictures off the camera ,I think I will leave that part up to him for now on.