Expert Witness

Charlie is zonked out in the car after a grueling two-hour evaluation at Children's Hospital's Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program. I asked for the evaluation so I could have an objective, outside opinion on what we can do for Charlie when he turns three and "graduates" from Early Intervention speech services. From then on, services will come from our town, and we need to know what to ask for. It helps to have a recommendation from Ye Best Kid Hospital Evah. Kind of like an expert witness at a trial.

"What would you like to get out of this evaluation?" asked Denise, the woman evaluating Charlie. "Well," I said. "We want you to recommend that our town give speech services to Charlie. Uh... I mean... we want your honest opinion about what we should do for Charlie." I told Denise I'd visited the integrated preschool but wanted to keep him at the school where he is now. Denise smiled and said that she thought he should have services, based solely upon the fact that his hearing and oral motor functioning are compromised. "He's doing great now, but we can't rely on that," she said. In the past, people thought that if you could hear fine out of one ear, you'd be fine. But those kids, it turned out, were 10 times more likely to have problems in school. All it takes is a little bit of speech therapy, maybe an amplification device for the teacher, a little attention to where Charlie's sitting and the air conditioner and the door to the hallway, and those problems can be avoided.

For the first few minutes we all sat on the floor and played with hire trucks while Denise, the woman evaluating Charlie, listened to him say huge long sentences replete with consonants, like "Look at that big big truck." Denise noted, and we discussed, some of the missing sounds.

Then the real work began, as Charlie and Denise sat in those little preschool chairs and played with a variety of toys and read a story about a golden retriever puppy. "What's that?" Denise asked, pointing to the lace-up sneaker that the puppy was chewing. "Shoes and ribbon!" Charlie said. Denise asked him to put the white button under the cup, to put the pink pig behind the man, to find three short pencils. She doled out Thomas the Tank Engine stickers, which Charlie placed haphazardly on a piece of blue construction paper.

After an  hour I started fantasizing about a venti caramel macchiato; after an hour and a half I was pinching my own thighs to stay awake. How did Charlie, who is only two and a half, manage to pay attention for that long and not throw the hire truck at Denise's head? "You are fantastic!" Denise cheered.  "I have no concerns about his concept development," she said to me.

Finally, when she laid out a bunch of dollhouse furniture, Charlie began to mess with her mind. "Which one of these do you go to sleep on?" Denise asked. Charlie pointed to a blue wooden bathtub. "Really?" said Denise. "Where do you take a bath?" Charlie pointed to a pink plastic bed. "That bathtub," he said.

And still Denise pushed on. Finally, she finished her 97 page checklist and allowed Charlie to take his hire truck back to the floor. She turned to me to discuss her perceptions of Charlie. We talked about how his speech and language are exploding, which is typical between 2.5 and 3.  His receptive language is great, and his expressive language is good too. "What we want to look out for," she said, "is the articulation, because that can affect language." I asked her what she meant. She explained that if Charlie is leaving off a -s or a -ed at the end of a word--if he said "He walk" instead of "he walks" or "he walked," then an articulation problem suddenly becomes a communication problem.

So. One-on-one speech therapy is a good thing.

Denise is going to work up a report for me. It will tell me not an age range, like before, when they told me that his expressive language was 14-16 months with scattered responses at the 18 month level, but more like a percentile, like, he speaks as well as 75% of other kids his age. The town will have some sort of cut off for who they give speech services to.

My friend Julie, speech and language pathologist to the stars (or at least to the classmates of the children of certain Red Sox players), thinks the town won't even pick him up for services. He's that good, people. But because he has the hearing loss, he's at risk for not reaching his top potential. So we want them to pick him up.

Over all, I would say it was a good, productive evaluation. I've now signed the consent form for the town to do their own evaluation (more tiny plastic pigs and spoons!), which they'll have to do in the next 30 days. After that we will meet with the town to discuss something called an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan. That has to be done before his birthday, April 30--and with two school vacation weeks between now and then, it's not ridiculous to say the town will be scrambling.

And that is that for today. Summer's class decorated plastic jugs to be used as valentine mailboxes and also took a trip to the big post office--by the way, have I mentioned how excrutiatingly unhelpful they were at the big post office when I went to renew Summer's passport? But, guess what, the passport came in less than three weeks! So the feds are back on their game there.

I myself am off to book club tonight, where we will discuss Stuart: A Life Backwards, which I really like so far, but will not finish in time.

Cheers!

Oh also, I forgot to mention that I went to the Celtics game with my friend Michelle, and it was so much fun. We got on the Jumbotron but only for a split second. Jeff was horrified when I asked him "Who's Ray Allen?" but now I know the names of like eight Celtics and they are very fun to watch. The Celtics can heal your pain, Patriots fans.

Now I'd better go wake up Charlie or he will be up until midnight watching the military channel with Jeff.

Comments

[shaina]

oh goodness i miss that boy! he is SO SMART. messing with that lady's mind. seriously, do you feed your kids special vitamins or something? hehe.
i miss you alllll! you know, when i went off to college a YEAR AND A HALF AGO you promised you'd come visit.................i'm waiting!

[Krista27]

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