It can be really hard to have a non-verbal child. It can be even harder when she’s actually only non-verbal in situations where vocalization is actually necessary for whatever is happening at that moment.
Take for example, our trip to the eye doctor yesterday. Guess who was the patient?
If you guess Olivia, you get a gold star! Go you.
Yes, Olivia needed to see the eye doctor. She hadn’t been seen since October of 2015 and it was time.
She was first seen by the technician who wanted to get a bit of an idea of how O is seeing with her glasses on.
Would Olivia read off the letters the tech was showing her? Nope. She’d barely nod when I asked her about the letters.
I tried to be patient. I knelt on the floor beside her chair and told her she could whisper the letters to me and I’d tell the tech. She sat there stone-faced. It was simply not going to happen.
Then…THEN this awesome young woman suggested that Olivia write down the letters she could see. How brilliant was that?
Liv was happy to write those letters for her. She wrote four different times, once for each eye to test her near vision and once for each eye for distance vision. I was seriously so impressed with the patience and innovation of this technician. I told the doctor when he came in how awesome his staff is.
Liv wouldn’t speak for the doctor either but lucky for her, he’s got other ways of figuring out what her prescription needs to be.
She got to pick out new frames for glasses that will be ready in about a week. She’s thrilled with the purple glasses that are on their way to her face.
I’m just happy we managed to luck into awesome medical professionals who take their time to treat Olivia like a person, like she deserves to be treated. I understand that at the end of the day, it might be hard to deal with a kid who just seems like she’s being a brat for the sake of being a brat but yesterday, no one did that. They saw my sweet girl and worked with her to the best of their ability to give her the awesome care she deserves, spoken words or not.
A mom, a dad and two daughters. We're living ordinary lives with a twist of 5p- (Cri du Chat) for spice. But we're about so much more than our younger daughter's genetic diagnosis.
2 comments:
Two favorite parts:
1. People who can think of the IDEAS that HELP SOLVE THE ISSUE. I am not as good at that as others are, and I so admire the ones who ARE good at it.
2. "She’s thrilled with the purple glasses that are on their way to her face."
I love this blog. I love that she's getting purple glasses that will be perfect for her face because someone took the time to work with you guys. Love Love Love
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