Living with Cerebral Palsy 🍋🍋

Saturday 8 November 2014

TGI Friday

It's been an exhausting week again for poor Elin. As predicted her dystonia started on Hallowe'en and has continued for a full week. It's not been as bad as the week before half term but still, it's rendering her unable to do an awful lot except sit on your knee and be cuddled. Any necessary car rides are back to being traumatic and tiring for her. I'm watching intently for signs of improvement- she's due to improve now after all- if we are continuing down the good week/bad week route that is. I guess we'll see.
Something Elin did manage to do this week was attend an appointment with a 'Bobath' physiotherapist.  Bobath, as I understand it, is a form of physio designed especially for those affected by Cerebral Palsy. It is widely recognised as being the best form of physio for kids like Elin and most children's physiotherapists are now schooled in it's teachings. There is a centre for Bobath down in Cardiff and I know some parents have taken their children down there for intensive treatment and been pleased with the results. Elin has been lucky enough to be exposed to this form of therapy for some time now via her fab school physio's, but still it was good to go and meet one of the 'experts' from Cardiff and to see what she did with Elin.
It was a bit of a surreal experience truth be told as we entered the familiar physio room at our local children's centre- there must've been about twenty professionals sitting around the room watching us. Elin's school physio and the Bobath therapist started work with Elin immediately and I sat awkwardly on the floor with them, hugely self conscious of not knowing what to do and wondering if there were any holes in my leggings or if the bottoms of my shoes were dirty, what with 20-odd strangers looking at them. My focus was soon pulled however by the Bobath therapist herself who was quite fascinating and spoke like Dracula. Seriously. Her accent was totally 'The Count' from the Muppets!! She didn't have a purple face and a cloak but it appealed to my immature side and amused me silently for longer than it probably should have done. On the plus side, it helped relax me no end as I tried to work out where she was from, imagining gothic and intriguing countries where she rode around on  horseback at dusk providing Bobath to children in need in return for cups full of blood.  Anyway, I digress. The point is, she was brilliant.
It's hard to explain what she was doing, so I took some photo's. Sufficed to say I haven't really seen Elin in one or two of these positions before so it was really interesting. I liked seeing her standing up (against a ball) as we don't see her standing up unless she's strapped into a frame, and I said as much without really thinking -which naturally produced a collective 'awwwww' from all the people around the edge of the room and made me feel immediately sad and slightly pitiful. How can I be in a position where I have never seen my daughter stand freely and I no longer even notice? But there certainly wasn't time to dwell as Dracula was bouncing Elin up and down rather vigorously on a ball then stretching her out like a medieval prisoner on the rack- which may I add, Elin was LOVING (as much as she can love anything when mid-way through a dystonic week anyway).
So here are a couple of photo's. I noticed one of the physio's was filming the whole thing and I am greatly hoping we can have a copy as Paul would love to see what happened and I know Elin's teachers and helpers at school would too. We were very lucky to get the time with such an expert and for the first time I seriously considered travelling to Cardiff at some point to be taught some techniques to use ourselves, you know, when the Dystonia calms down and we can actually travel!
Have a good weekend blog-fans thanks for caring about our girl
xxxxxx





And, finally, just because I know you blog fans can't get enough of Elin photo's.....

After school on Friday    ....and a little while later...........
 


xxxxxxx




SHARE:

No comments

Post a Comment

Blogger Template Created by pipdig