The neuropsychologist confirmed the motor dyspraxia and said the difficult birth could have caused his issues, but there is no way to prove it. She said at age 11 it is really too late for occupational therapy to do my son any good. There was so much information and I was in shock after hearing "it's too late now for therapy" so I will have to wait for the report that she said she would mail to us to try to make sense of it all. I remember she said something about one of the tests showed he was at a 1% level in his dominant hand (right hand) but average in his left and she had no explanation for this. The scores were all over the place with things that didn't require good visual motor integration being much higher. I remember she said he reads at a 12th grade level, he speaks very well with good pronunciation, seems to know a lot of factual information but would sometimes go off on a tangent when they just wanted him to answer the question and move on. I remembered that after the testing my son told me he said something to the neuropsychologist and her student about reading "Fahrenheit 451" when they asked a question about technology or possible problems with having too much technology, and he mentioned the book "The Jungle" when they asked him about the purpose of the FDA. I am sure they didn't want to hear about any of the history of the FDA but when my son asked me what the test would be like I said I thought they might ask some general knowledge questions and I think he just wanted to show them that he had plenty of general knowledge. The neuropsychologist said she thought this "behavior problem" might be something they could work on if he went back to public school.
It was also a "problem" that he got distracted by a fly in the room during testing. I think this annoyed her. My son told me it kept trying to land on his drink. My son also found the two-way mirrors and people writing down everything he said a little distracting, but he said he did the best he could even when he was really tired in the afternoon after hours of testing when he was starting to get a headache.
I asked the doctor about the handwriting issues and why he would sometimes reverse letters and what causes the inconsistent performance and she said she couldn't say and that maybe it was because he hadn't been taught properly since he wasn't in school and it went downhill from there. I told her he did use Handwriting Without Tears to learn to print but he had been working on cursive only for the last year and hadn't practiced that for a couple of months because it is summer break. She said he was given the option to write in cursive but he wouldn't do it.
I will finally have a diagnosis on paper, so that is something, but I didn't get all the answers I was looking for and I will have to go back to the pediatrician at the base to get a referral for a physical therapy assessment in order to get a statement about the hiking for Boy Scouts. It took over 4 months just to get in to see the neuropsychologist so I have no idea how long this will take.
I still wish I could have him take a class or two at the school like maybe a debate class or literature class but they don't allow that in our state. If the school tested him and saw his handwriting that looks like 3rd grade level I doubt they would let him do anything at a higher grade level and the doctor said unless the school used the "discrepancy model" in deciding on what classes to put him in, he might be put in a lower grade just because of the handwriting difficulties.
My son still says he never wants to go back to our public school and would instead like to try to study for and CLEP out of a college course like history or economics. There is a community college near us and the CLEP tests are multiple choice and it is all done on a computer. I don't think there is a minimum age requirement for this. I am checking now to see if this might be a possibility for him.
