Asking for an evaluation

[celticdragonfly]

I just got off the phone with Harbor Regional Center, the people who did Brendan's autism diagnosis. I'm asking them to do an evaluation on Maggie. Ryan, Brendan's counselor, doesn't think they'll manage to get her done before we move - but then, the hopeful move date keeps slipping, and I'd really kick myself if we were here long enough and I hadn't asked for this. So he put me through to the person taking referrals, and she got the paperwork started for me.

I didn't want to do this. I really want to believe she's going to be normal and fine. In many ways, she seems like she couldn't be autistic - she's so much more social than her brother is. But... she doesn't have diddly for language development so far. She doesn't have any words in English. Well, she says Mama occasionally. But most other kids by now are at least saying something like "baba" when they're hungry or SOMETHING. And she isn't.

We'd been taking part in a survey of autistic siblings - at various ages they send us a developmental questionnaire. I don't know exactly how they score it, of course, so there's limited conclusions I can draw from it. But I can see that she's consistently doing the top of the line on physical development - walking, manipulation, etc - and much more towards the bottom of the possibilities on language development and some of the social stuff.

I need to be careful comparing her to Brendan, too - 2 data points is too limited to be sure of, especially when he's a boy and she's a girl.

People have started to try to comfort me with various tales of later talking children and kids that go straight to full sentences, etc. I'm hearing the exact same comforting words that people told me when I worried about Brendan!

My worries about Brendan led me to wait and wait - that and my ignorance. We didn't get a language delay diagnosis on him until 3, and got the autism diagnosis at age 5. I am not going to risk that with Maggie. As much as I don't want to hear bad news, I don't want to bury my head in the sand and miss things. If she does need help, even if it's just limited speech therapy, she is darn well going to get it as EARLY intervention. Hopefully, we can help her over this and it can eventually just be a memory. But I think we need to get her tested.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

Good luck. And, yes, better to know yea or nay early.

[ekaterin.livejournal.com]

Much better to know. And there are many different ways that the autistic spectrum can express itself in a person.

My nephew was diagnosed with an autism variant just last year and he turned 16 last month. So we are too late for any help in teaching him. And why? Because he does not have the classical variation, and the schools he was in preferred to think that he did not want to learn some subjects, even while my sister insisted that he was not that way.

And while all those people are right, and it might just be a coincidence that she is slow in starting to talk, you do not know, until it is tested and disregarded.

E.

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Yep, I think it's definitely worth investigating further.

If you haven't done it already, you might also want to get her hearing checked -- according to a friend of mine with severe hearing loss, some of the language (lack-of) behaviors of autistic & PDD small kids sound a lot like those of hearing-impaired small kids.

Good luck! --slc

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

We've done some informal testing, & we're pretty sure she hears fine. But if they want to formally test her hearing, sure, we'll go for it. The school did that during Brendan's original evaluation, the one that led to his original "language delayed" diagnosis.