Sam's Therapies

A day in the life of Sam

It's busy all the time. Not much of it is fun, but we've met a lot of friends along the way.

Right now, Sam has physical therapy three days a week. We are going to hyperbaric oxygen five days a week, and I do ABR on him for 3-5 hours every day. (Occasionally, I burn out and one or more of these things just doesn't happen.) He's responding well, and getting better VERRRRY slowly.

Pediatric Therapy Works

Sam started seeing April when he was just a few months old. She loves Sam and he loves her too. They do physical therapy, and sometimes he doesn't like it, but his work is always rewarded with craniosacral therapy at the end of the session. I have always been grateful that April can communicate with Sam in a way that I can't. He also sees Pat now, who can get him to sit and do things that we didn't think he could do.

We absolutely love the therapists and staff at PTW.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Wow - I could go on and on about HBOT. But we've recently been BLESSED to find a program run by the Masons - which is providing HBOT for free! Sam was deprived of oxygen at birth, and hyperbaric oxygen provides oxygen to him on a much deeper level than just breathing provides. Our health care system doesn't provide this - it's basically just used for wound care and a few other things. I actually lose sleep at night wondering how different our circumstances would be now if Sam had gotten HBOT right after birth. A lot of countries would have REQUIRED it, but we had to find it on our own.

Grumble, grumble, sigh.

Anyway, since it's "off-label" - a term meaning that it's not what it's prescribed for - insurance isn't covering it, so we first had to pay $250 an hour to a commercial doctor we saw. And we went 5 days a week. But now we have found these absolute SAINTS, who allow strangers in their house all day long, to get their children treated. amazing, huh?

We were trying to figure out how to get the money together to try some more HBOT with Sam when we found this group. What a blessing. Sam's been moving more, making more sounds, and responding more quickly to a lot of things. Going in there is helping to get him out of there.

ABR Therapy

Oh, how we love and hate this therapy. We have to love it - it has already helped Sam tremendously. But man oh man oh - it does take up your day!

ABRCanada.com is a tremendous plan. The basic idea is that it will build Sam back up again, as his body has collapsed because of the brain injury. It's kind of like core training, except he isn't doing it himsef and I'm building up parts of him like his intenstine and his brain. We started seeing changes almost immediately - astonishing.

Therapeutic Listening

Every day, Sam does about 1.5 hours of therapeutic listening. It's kind of hard to explain, but, again, we've heard lots of good stuff about it. It kind of fine-tunes your ears, I think. Sam listens to this particular CD for about 40 minutes in the morning, and then at least 3 hours later, he listens to it again. It's kind of like Auditory Integration Therapy, but it's made for home use and much cheaper. We had to spend a fortune on the specific headphones, so I'm going to go ahead and think they matter. But Sam seems to enjoy it, and if it makes him feel good, I'm all for it. It's also something he can do while I'm doing dishes or laundry or something so I don't feel like I'm ignoring him - that's pretty good for alleviating the guilt factor! I ALWAYS feel like I'm letting him down if I'm not DOing something, so this helps.

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