Developmental Pediatrician, round 2..

Today, Ella went to see the developmental pediatrician from UMMC. This is essentially the 6-month follow-up to the previous visit. However, this time Ella saw a different doctor, as the previous has moved on to work for a county government. Actually, she wound up seeing two doctors, as they were running quite behind when they finally got to us and wanted to team up to make the testing parts go faster.

In general, this visit wasn't a whole lot different from the last. One doctor interviewed us while the other gave her a developmental assessment, using the CAT/CLAMS test pair, which showed her to be about 25% delayed (18 months). This is a bit different from what the county school system came up with (12 to 15 months, with one area at 18 months), but they use a different test (ELAP), and the past two weeks have shown a LOT of progress for Ella.

After the developmental assessment, they gave her a physical examination. During this they tested her reflexes noted her muscle tone was slightly low, but not of any great concern. This also matches up with the previous observations of Ella's physical therapist. They examined her eyes, inner ears, mouth, teeth and throat for abnormalities and found none. They also made some observations of Ella's facial and body features and compared them against ours looking for signs of genetic deviation. Ella has a few "off average" features, but she comes by most of them honestly (like my smallish mouth and long toes).

After all that we spent some time talking. They again said there were no signs of autism, just the motor problems we already know about. They said they could refer us to a geneticist, but at this point the only reason to do so would be to find causality (with almost no likelihood of finding anything of therapeutic value) and therefore didn't recommend it. While that might be interesting to know, I tend to agree with them it is not worth subjecting Ella to more tests for something that's merely interesting.

They also suggested a form of speech therapy that works well for children with motor disorders (PROMPT), but after some research, I think our SLP is using some PROMPT techniques.

Finally, they suggested we set up another visit in 6 months to continue to track her progress, this time at a different center as they might want to bring in some other experts.

So, that was basically what happened there.