Elizabeth has just finished her daily sessions with Ramon Cuevas for her Medek Therapy. Ramon had some new tricks for and exercises for Elizabeth and she in the beginning soared though them. The first day she mocked his balance exercises and would dance on his wobbling boards, so he upped the ante and had her completing acts that I think only the gymnasts in Circ De'soliel could perform. Ramon continues to be patient with Elizabeth as she teases him and pokes at him and he seems to be really impressed with Elizabeth and how hard she works. It is still is unbelievable that she can perform highly challenging exercises with ease but her walking can be so unstable and erratic. It was a crazy long week and it is a lot for Elizabeth to be expected to perform and spend so much time cooped up in the car. We still have a couple more sessions but they are on weekends so this weeks 3-4 hr drive will be reduced to an hour each way and it is not at dinner time so no more eating junk food in the car and restaurants. We have already noticed Elizabeth is lifting her knees up when she walks and she has even stepped up some curbs and up the front step without holding on to someone. It seems like working with Ramon gives her additional confidence and allows her brain to handle obstacles naturally she does not have to stop and process what her body needs to do she can just do it.
3 comments:
Very cool! Way to go Elizabeth! I'm so impressed with the therapy you guys do.
To answer your question about Anika's trigger's for wobbly days. We know that sickness and heat can really affect her stability. But sometimes there is no trigger we can see. What disturbs we the most is when she's really spacy too and struggles to find words and put together sentences. One of these days well catch one during the week and admit and do more tests.
We just saw a PT at Shriner's who said he she's lots of ataxic kids. He said it was really common to have balance thrown of during growth spurts.
He also said that swimming is one of the best excerses for ataxia.
Are you guys still thinking Elizabeth has ataxia or is it dystonia now? Both? It's so hard when no knows isn't it. You don't expect that with so much medical knowledge. And each doctor will tell you something else.
We had one doctor tell us that she had either one of two degenerative diseases. Totally freaked me out. But one else agreed. So far Anika continues to progress dispite those damn wobbly days.
Summer
I'm glad it went so well. Ramon is so amazing I wish i had taken Ashley.
That is wonderful to see. I stopped doing Medek with Max, but seeing her doing those exercises brought back fond memories. I loved our Medek teacher and I think it did Max a world of good in terms of helping him walk well.
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