Hi, posting back about ds8 whom I just yesterday took for an appointment with a developmental pediatrician.
We are trying to look into possible auditory processing problems for him, due to issues with hearing in noisy situations, attention problems esp. in noisy situations and some rote memorization issues (mainly math facts). Also I discussed his social problems - he has a friend or two now, but for a long time (1st and 2nd grade) he would wonder aloud why he didn't have any friends.
I think I might have been at the wrong doctors office.
It was a pretty long discussion, about 2 hours.
She suggested strongly that pursuing any issues with auditory processing problems would be useless.
Me: "he had a lot of ear infections when he was a toddler, no ear tubes". "He seems to be unable to understand me in the noisy car or a noisy classroom."
Dr:"But his hearing is fine now - so if he's fine, he's fine."
and "It is really hard to get someone to do an accurate assessment of auditory processing issues". "They don't really know what it is." (Meaning I guess that there are questions about the validity of auditory processing being a separate area of function than just plain old 'hearing'.)
This seems strange to me since they have an auditory specialist listed in the same office..., but of course during the conversation I was like, 'uh huh, ok. uh huh.' I hate when I do that!
The regular ped. had mentioned seeking info from the developmental pediatrician about pursuing the auditory issue question, and the social question. She also said it was fairly standard to screen for add when questions about attention come up and that asperger's might be an explanation for the social issues.
After explaining the social issues the dev. ped. asked if anyone had suggested asperger's. I told her that was part of what our pediatrician suggested we look at, although I wasn't 'seeing it' myself. Most of the questions from that point were about symptoms which I am familiar with being associated with aspergers.
She asked him to explain about Yu-Gi-Oh, his current favorite game/subject. He started talking about Yugioh in relation to some other similar card games, and it seemed to me that he did take a bit of a pendantic tone, but that is not how he normally speaks with me, nor with most other kids. He had the same tone the other day when he was explaining yugioh to one of his cousins, I asked him to be a little nicer and he adjusted his tone pretty easily.
He does sort of hold his body still, and I can see that he is 'arranging' his thoughts when he's got a 'big idea'. Anyway, so she asks whether he often speaks in a monotone; I said sometimes, but usually he is pretty expressive. (He was one of only 5 kids picked last year to have a speaking part in the 2nd grade play and was roundly complimented on his expressiveness - he was one of the only kids who didn't just quickly mumble his lines.)
She asked about asperger's in the family (yes, one cousin, possibly one of my brothers)
She asked about his coordination, which is good, we talked about his dancing.
She asked him some questions about how he likes school, she did a 'mood screen' with him to try to make sure the issues weren't making him downright depressed.
She was very complimentary and said he has got a lot too offer and if we could get past the social thing, help him with that, that would be her main focus. The math fact/computation thing she suggested I might pursue with the school, although if it's fairly insignificant part of the curriculum, they might decide it is not affecting him negatively enough to warrant an assessment for ld.
While we were talking he got interested in a floor puzzle of the states and was working that; he had like 5 pieces to go and she decides it's time to interrupt and have him do this mood screen. Well, we had to be fairly persuasive to get him to release the last pieces and sit up and do the paperwork..he didn't have a fit or anything but was not looking at us, just trying to continue the puzzle until I wrapped my arms around him and the doctor asked again if he would do one last piece and then come to the table. This more than anything had me worried...the dr. didn't say anything about it. Normally I wouldn't even have thought about it, but now I am questioning everything.
There's the long, here's the short of it:
Mood screen seemed to show basically a happy kid, some mild feelings of 'blah', as the dr. put it. Just sort of a drifty feeling, not too excited about many things. OK. (huh?)
She recommended some extremely casual counseling primarily to help him navigate some of these social issues and she said it might just help him in general to have someone he can talk to about some stuff.
She didn't want to definitely say 'Aspergers' then, or maybe at all, which I thought was about right...but maybe in 6 months we could look again at whether it would make sense to assess formally for that (not sure if this depends on his making progress in the realm of social interaction or what)
There was just a LOT of different stuff talked about. I came home COMPLETELY exhausted.
My main questions right now are: Does what she said about the auditory processing issue make sense? We didn't really talk about hearing testing under non-ideal situations (aka noisy)
Am I in denial about the aspergers? I really like the idea of some informal counseling to help ds with social skills so I will definitely try that, but I am just wondering if the dr. is trying to ease me around to the idea of aspergers. Not a lot of talk about these behaviors or social issues being part of the picture for some gifted kids. I had asked the receptionist if the dr. was used to dealing with gifted kids and got an ok answer, but now I have to wonder.
Last edited by chris1234; 01/30/09 03:44 AM.
