A Frustrating Week with a hopefull ending.

This week was a very frustrating week for the Jensen family. It was filled with a few more doctor appts. for Bubba Jo. First one was on Monday in Springfield and was one of the most frustrating Doctor visits we have ever had. It was with a Developmental ped. It started out as any other, the normal questions we have grown use to. Next a half hour of play evaluation session which is controlled play for him. It is a way to evaluate his abilities to do simple tasks, the tasks get increasingly harder and more tedious. Well for Bub sadly this is old hat for him because of all the times he has been asked to do them. His fine motor skills are very good he his gross motor not so much and his speech has not improved much. So now Kimberly ( the kids mom ) and i are waiting for the worst part of the whole process and that is the results of the evaluation.

The frustration with the doctor started instantly for me, Her first comment was "in my field i like to be wrong" and i thought WHAT? where is this going. then the bomb hit, Bubba has the diagnosis of sever mental retardation. Then she proceeded to tell us how he would never communicate eather with speech or with sign. Then i thought in my head wait he already does sign not much but he does (more frustration) . Next she explained that how he is walking is the not going to get better for the rest of his life. inside my head agin i went WAIT he has only been walking for 3 months, and has progressed very quickly in that area. (even more frustration). At this point I am having a very hard time comprehending anything that is coming out of this doctors mouth due my temper being gone! Kimberly was a wreck trying to wrap her head around all of it. all we want to do is just get out of their. and the kicker is the ending She said "I was so impressed at his ability to do the tasks he was asked to do most kids his age i see cant do them". THEN WHY DID I HAVE TO JUST SIT HERE AND LISTEN TO EVERYTHING YOU JUST SAID AND HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH YOUR DIAGNOSIS???? At this point i was done i couldn't think i couldn't talk i was just plain mad. she ended with "I'm sorry you are having to deal with a child like this" I flat out flipped out and said what? Kim knew this was bad. Kim looked at me and said "think of you son and your god". Man that woman has learned how to stop me in my tracks. I turned and looked at the doctor who looked a little scared at this point and said " i am not sorry I was blessed with this child and i could not be more proud of him and his accomplishments". she tried to say something but Kim stopped her and said I believe this conversation is over we will show ourselves out.

The long car ride home was ended well Kim and i prayed the min. we were settled in the car and then we started talking about the whole diagnosis. The diagnosis is not what bothers us it is the fact that we are expected to just stop trying and just live with what we have. Our family is not capable of doing that we have to keep trying new thing and do what is best. So when we got back to town we decided to just table that doc appt and move on to the next. we had another appt scheduled with another developmental ped in st louis for Wednesday.

On Wednesday we headed to cardinal glenon hospital but someone missed something and the appt was canceled so we rescheduled for Friday. This was not a big deal , we have been through many appts. at Cardinal and never once had a problem they were great about it . so no big deal Kim the kids and i went to lunch instead.

Friday back at Cardinal Glenon pretty much the same process with the tasks and the questions so then again sitting at a table across from 3 doctors starting to discus Bubba Jo. Again the diagnosis of MR but here is where things differed greatly from the expierance on Monday. they explained why. and here is why if Bub was to take an IQ test now he would score below 70 on the test which puts him in the MR range, the reason is that their are language, speech and comprehension questions on the IQ test which he can not do. OK now we are getting some where They told us that he is progressing very quickly in his walking seeing that he only started less than 3 months ago (in my head YEAH BUBBA!) they talked about how good his fine motor skills are (hooray for Bubba). And how great his social skills (YES BUBBA THE MAN) are and if any of you have ever meet my babies you know that they are social butterflies. They explained how they feel that he need more therapy in pt and speech. They gave us resources on who to talk to to get these in place. The more we talked to them the more I realized that the diagnosis of MR is a blessing because prior to a diagnosis he did not qualify for alot of programs and services. now he does Praise God.and they want to see us back in 6 months to evaluate and to give us more info on what direction to go. So to sum it up the week started out really bad and ended with a ton of hope and a direction we can go in. Praise God for that because that was exactly what we have been praying for. And let me just say that God made Bubba the amazing little guy he is for a reason and i will never question that I am very thankful that the Lord has blessed me with the 2 children he has. i am proud of them in every way and am very excited in what God has in store for this family. sorry it is so long but just had to vent.