Alex had his first PT session yesterday. I was A LITTLE nervous about how it was going to go. His PT evaluation really wasn’t that hot; nothing horrendous, but also pretty far from ideal. This was also our first therapy session, the first of what’s sure to be many, so there was that aspect to it as well.

Alex’s therapist arrived a few minutes early, introduced herself, and got right onto the floor with him. I got a very good from her which is obviously important if she’s to be on Alex’s dream-team of therapists and doctors. Very expressive, very nice, very talkative (she narrated everything she was doing, which was helpful for my note taking). Overall, she seemed to be very pleased with where Alex was. She DID notice that Alex prefers to look to his right side, but also stated that he only seemed to do that when he was laying down. Everywhere else and he was good to go.

She ran through a series of little exercises to do with Alex to help push him to his next set of monthly milestones, one of which includes sitting and mastery of rolling over. Throughout every exercise she emphasized the importance of giving Alex the least amount of help possible to keep him stable to coax him to use his own muscles, and instead of PLACING him into spots, to TRANSITION him into spots. Example – for tummy time, instead of picking him up and placing him directly on his belly, it’s much more helpful to use a toy to try to get his attention and direct it to one of his sides, then coax his hip in that direction to try to get him to initiate a roll. It all sounds like pretty obvious stuff, but hearing and seeing the exercises really drove it home. It also helped that Alex was clearly getting tired from the activity, so I knew he was working.

But by far, the best part of the appointment was when the therapist told us that Alex was doing fine developmentally from the PT spectrum of things, and nearly verbatim, “If this was Alex’s evaluation he probably wouldn’t have been recommended for physical therapy.” That was huge. Not only does it represent some sort of win for him, but it’s also a positive sign that he doesn’t have any other physical symptoms that have manifested, at least yet. I also asked about his balance – she said it was fine, he had no issues. Great stuff.

That was about the end of it. She did say that it might be beneficial to increase the therapies from monthly to bi-weekly once development started picking up more, the basis of it being that she can catch things earlier, monitor progress more often, and that there are basically a higher amount of milestones that will start happening. I’m not explaining it here as well as she did, but Shannon and I both agreed that it made sense if we got to that point.

We have an appointment with her for next month and obviously hope that Alex performs as well for that as he did here.

Now to see if we can get his other therapists into the picture…