Monday, November 14, 2011

Learning more about Bryce

Well, today was the day. The day when my life was turned upside down. The day I learned more about my son then ever before.

Ryan and I were both so nervous going into this meeting with Bryce's psychologist. Of course we were excited too, we were finally going to get some much needed answers. So we took Greyson to my mom's house, and headed over.

Once we arrived when we went back to Dr. Fusek's office. She had about a 10 page letter, that was all information complied, from us, Bryce's teacher and from what she gathered after meeting with us and Bryce the first time. She went through it all with us. Some good news before the bad, is that Bryce shows no signs of Autism or Aspergers. The major concern that she has with Bryce is his inability to process information. Bryce is an excellent reader, but he is unable to process what he is reading. He could read an entire book with hardly any problems, except at the end of the book, you ask he what the book was about and he is unable to tell you. He was given a test at her office, that was on the computer, when the question popped up on the screen he had a button to push when he knew the answer but he was constantly late pressing the button. Although he knew the answer, his brain was not processing the information about the question/answer in the proper time like the average person. The weird thing is this whole time, Bryce seemed so smart, we were so excited to learn about his IQ level because we thought he was going to be outstanding in that department, unfortunately his IQ level is lower than average, only at an 87. This is due to not being able to process what he is learning. Now don't think that he is not smart, because he is, he just needs help teaching his brain to learn it. Bryce has the ability to learn this stuff, it will just take alot of patience from us and his teachers. So with this learning issue (I don't want to say disability, because I am not ready to say that), his clinical diagnosis is ADD. Not to be confused with ADHD, because he does not show signs of the hyperactivity. Which surprised Ryan and I both, but she is the one with the PhD!

Our next diagnosis is by far the worst of them. As I have said before, Bryce seems to be extremely emotional about a fair amount of things. He gets sad and then gets angry. We knew that he was having some sort of emotional issue. But I was not prepared for her to diagnosis him with a mild case of clinical depression/anxiety. At 6 years old, you don't expect that. As a mother, that is your worst fear. That something you have no control over, something that is a chemical imbalance in your childs brain, makes them sad. As she explained this though, it started to make sense. For the past 2 or 3 years I have been getting so frustrated with Bryce, when he does not do things he is told or I have to tell him a hundred times to do something and he still looks at me confused, like he isn't PROCESSING what I am saying!!! I broke down and cried, how could I not know this was happening to my son, how could I get so upset that he wasn't listening, but it wasn't that he wasn't listening, it was that his brain takes longer to process.

This is probably confusing to some of you, it is still confusing to us. We will take this one day at a time. Today is a new day, today is the day my life was turned upside down, today is the day I start a new path to helping my son lead a better life. Thank you for your continued support. I will keep you updated with anything new. We will meet with Dr. Zollinger (Bryce's PCP) this Friday to talk about where we go from here. The Psycologists recommendation right now is a small dose of ADD medication, this should help kickstart his brain into helping with the process of information.

I just want the best for my baby. I found this picture of him when he was about 3, thought I would share.

No comments:

Post a Comment