Friday, March 09, 2007

And The Diagnosis Is...Umm...We're Not Sure

Today, Mark and I went to meet with Keegan's psychologist who did the psycho-educational testing with him over the last month and a half. The meeting was to discuss his results, and therefore, his forecasted diagnosis so to speak.

And the results were, well, ambiguous at best. Which, in a way, is kind of a good thing. Perhaps I should explain.

Basically, he was being tested to evaluate if he had a cognitive learning delay, and to explore whether or not he was in-line with an Asperger's profile.

Regarding the Asperger's, the answer is no. With the cognitive learning, half of his results were in the normal range, which was great to hear. This means that he does not have what is called a general or "global" delay. The other results were below average but not critically so. The problem is that since Keegan has expressive and responsive language delays, it sort of skews(sp?) his results a bit. It is difficult to determine whether he cannot perform the task because of a cognition problem, or because he does not understand the language presented to him in the deliverance of the instructions.

For example, Keegan has difficulty understanding linguistic concepts, like many, few, different, same. If you work with him for a long time, showing him examples, he will understand the concept, and be able to complete the task. But if you just say, show me the ones in this group that are different, he may not grasp the words "show me" or "different". So it appears that most of the delays that showed up during testing are language delay based.

To put in all in a nut shell, the hope is that as Keegan's language skills develop, so will his cognitive skills. His delays are LANGUAGE based, and not cognition based. Confused? Me too. But what it all comes down to is that this is something that with a lot of work, he can overcome. It will not impact him life-long. Of course, there is the risk that he may have an actual language DISORDER, which we won't know for about two more years, at which time he may have to be reassessed.

So what do I know? Not much. But it is a good thing, to us. Better to have the hope, than to have a label at this point. What is comes down to is that here we have a really bright kid, who has some walls up in his head that we have to take down brick by brick to open up his information highway.

And as Scoop, Muck, Dizzy, Roley and Lofty would say, "We're on the job!"

3 comments:

radiogurl said...

Well that's good news.

Right?

Shannon said...

Right.

Anonymous said...

Sounds promising to me...sounds like something he will be able to overcome. With you as a mom, I'm sure the odds are on his side.