Josephine is doing very good. I was excited the other day when she put two words together. She was pretending to put a purse on her shoulder and go bye bye. She closed the door and said, "bye bye mommy".
She is saying lots of words, like up, stop, no, dog, eat, bottle, toy, tree, flower, ball, bye bye, Jesse (for a TV show she likes), Barney, ouch, book, read, apple, hotdog, baby, all done, more, weeweewee (for requesting "this little piggy went to the maket"), peekaboo, yumyumyum, open (pronounced "oppa"), wash (used for washing floor dishes, her face, and her nose), night night, amma, nana, sissy, Lynda,...and I'm sure lots more I'm forgetting. She still says "thank you" in Mandarin many many times per day. It makes me smile every time she says it!
I'm still concerned that she has not started stringing words together, as plenty of other kids home from China, her age, have done. However, I do know that sometimes kids with strokes just take longer to get there.....but, they often, do make it all the way.....in their own time.
The tightness and jerking in her arm is still significant. Therefore, we tried botox last week. We should start to see it loosening up this weekend. She did great, and Dr. Veda did a great job of getting all the shots done quickly! She screamed during it, but recovered quickly afterwards. I didn't pass out during it, so it was a successful afternoon.
As we were leaving, I saw a doctor whose name tag I recognized from the bottom of some of Madalyn's EEG reports. I told him I recognized his name as the doctor that wrote our EEG reports, and he asked me if I wanted to see her EEGs! I said YES. He then pulled up the actual EEG on the computer, and showed me how you can tell which waves are spikes, and what the other stuff means, such as eye blinks. I had tried to figure it out by googling it and never understood. But after showing us, my mom and I were able to look through and successfully pick out the spikes. The spikes to me were the pointy, and less rounded ones....now He also said quantity, frequency, and size of of spikes do not correlate to how often a child will have clinical seizures. I knew this, but always want to know more!
Just like an MRI will not predict the involvement of a child's motor deficits, learning, behavior, or speech difficulties, an EEG will not predict the severity or frequency of seizures. It still seems like enough studies could find predictors, but perhaps they aren't reliable enough to use. Or maybe they are telling me the whole truth and there is no correlation. Although I know it doesn't matter, it's one of those things you wish you knew about your kid's future.
