Junior Problem Solver

(This is another Lucas story. Sorry.)

Short story, but true. Lucas and I are playing with the toy vehicles he's obsessed with. I get a little toy plane wound up and aim at at Lucas. He steps aside and lets it sail under the bed. Far under the bed.

I asked Joan to get the laundry stick (a thing used to get stuff on and off the high points where we hang laundry) but she was too busy to get it. I didn't want to try both keeping track of a hyperactive toddler while going out to the balcony to find the stick, so I just told Lucas "sorry, I can't get it".

Lucas, pauses, staring at me. He then trundles off to the corner of the room where we have a long-forgotten old mop handle leaning for obscure historical reasons. This mop handle is something nobody's even glanced at for over a year. Lucas, however, not only spotted it but figured out how it could be used to get his precious aeroplane. He stands pointing at it making eager sounds and sure enough, I go get it and retrieve the plane.

That's already pretty impressive in its own right. This gets better, though. My son has a mischievous streak in him and as soon as the handle was put back he took his plane and threw it under the bed. He misjudged the distance, though, and I was able to snag the plane without the stick. So he threw it again, much more successfully. He glances up at me with twinkling eyes full of mischief, laughing at my expression.

Of course I'm not a nice person so I had Joan take him from the room for a short time. In that time I rescued the plane and hid the pole. When Lucas came trundling back he made a beeline for the plane and, as expected, laughed as he threw it under the bed. Then, when I didn't immediately go pick up the stick to rescue it, he trundled off to where the mop handle used to be and, without looking, pointed at it making urgent sounds. I affected confusion. He looked. The most crestfallen face I've ever seen him put on without crying materialized. He was utterly baffled, actually touching the wall to make sure the thing was actually gone.

Merriment ensued.

Settling down to the new routine.

So, the last couple of weeks have been very crazy and I lacked all energy and desire to think about my life at all, not to mention telling people about it. Things have settled down (somewhat), now, so I'll do a brief recap.

Lucas' medical problem is definitely not a serious version. There is every indication, in fact, that he could have learned to walk on his own and just been a little odd-looking while doing it for the rest of his life. There's even the possibility that there isn't a problem at all and that he's just a slow developer walking-wise. Still, that being said, I support the therapy for him. It's really simple analysis:

1. We don't do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. He's saddled with it for life. (bad outcome)
   
2. We don't do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)
   
3. We do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. The therapy helps him. (good outcome)
4. We do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)

If we don't do the therapy, we've got one bad possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. If we do the therapy we've got one good possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. (I'm not factoring in the cost of the therapy because the analysis is specifically for "should we spend the cash?" I'm also not putting in pessimistic evaluations like "we do the therapy and it makes things worse" for reasons I'll outline below.) Basically the answer writes itself, doesn't it?

Anyway, after some serious adjustments to lifestyles, we've settled into a new routine. I've had glimpses of his treatment in bits and pieces over the last little while but today, courtesy of visiting friends of Joan's mother and my own availability because of the national holiday (Grave-Sweeping Day), I got the whole picture and can paint a copy of it for those of you who haven't fallen asleep because of Yet Another Lucas Blog Entry (YALBE). Here's what my son goes through every day.

First he's bundled up and taken to the hospital. Upon arrival he's scheduled for the "neural channel balance" treatment. When the time comes, he's taken into the torture chamber treatment room and hooked up to the machine. The first round, for ten minutes, has electrodes on his wrists and at his elbows. He's given low-voltage, low-amperage shocks about 2.5 times per second making his muscles twitch. He hates this with a passion and starts squalling along with the 10-15 other babies in the room being given the same indignities. After a few minutes of this he stops squalling and just whines a lot. Now I'll point out that this treatment is not painful (I tried it out once for a lark as a form of exercise a few years back). It's just really, really annoying and to a baby undoubtedly really, really frightening.

After the ten minutes on the arm, the electrodes are moved to the ball of the foot and the back of the knee and he's left twitching there for 20 minutes. He hates this even more and squalls the entire time, exhausting himself. When this is finished he's moved to a different machine and hooked up behind the ears. I don't know what this particular machine is called since the labelling is all in Chinese, but it doesn't seem to cause any visible twitching. Further, once the electrodes are glued on and the machine turned on, Lucas slowly relaxes and, because of the exhaustion from the first two rounds, falls asleep. This goes on for 30 minutes.

Once the electroshock neural channel balance treatment is completed, he's moved over to physiotherapy. There a very nice doctor (and very patient, something he has to be to deal with a child as strong and wilful as my son!) puts Lucas through his paces. Now in the past, according to Joan, Lucas actively fought with the doctors. I saw no signs of this today, however. He didn't cry. He didn't struggle (much). He whined at a couple of things, but mostly he just patiently endured and played with Joan and I while the doctor forced his feet and legs into proper postures and held him there for a while. (The one time he whined loudly, but not quite cried, had the doctor forcing him to squat and stand repeatedly for about five minutes straight.) This goes on for about 40 minutes. After that Lucas is left free to crawl (and walk!) around the physiotherapy room with its padded floors and walls (not to mention the large selection of toys and balls, the former supplied by the various parents in the room who share with each other).

Some of the equipment in this room amused me. It looks very basic and unsophisticated, like a rustic's notion of a hospital, but each piece was actually quite well-designed for its task. One piece, for example, for assisting with balance, is basically a platform with a V-shaped bottom. The doctor stands on the platform, helping the baby stand, and then rocks the platform back and forth. In a western hospital this would be an expensive piece of electrical equipment, likely computer controlled, but in the end would do exactly the same thing -- just for a thousand times (literally) the price. Sometimes the technology fetish of the west amuses me.

Anyway, back to Lucas' day.

This is his lunchtime. Normally he's taken back to his bed in the hospital and is fed, but today was special. We dragged him out of the hospital and into a restaurant with Joan's mother and the visiting friends. After that we returned to the hospital for the manual torture massage therapy. Again Joan insists that he usually fights the doctor and screams loudly, and to give her credit the other babies in the room (six tables, four were active) were certainly lending credence to this report. Whatever the reason, though, Lucas today just slept through it. I mean that literally. He slept through 30 minutes or so of the 45-minute massage.

The doctor was very good. Very strong, but very skillful, fingers worked over my boy quickly, precisely, firmly and yet gently. (I wish I could find a masseuse like that for my back!) Lucas woke up toward the end, when the massage moved up to his head, and he started a low-grade whining when the masseuse started working on his head around his face. Otherwise, however, he was having more fun playing with Joan and me than he was having annoyance at the massage. This despite the fact that all around him were babies screaming at the top of their lungs as they were manipulated up and down the entire length of their bodies.

Then it was time to come home again, Lucas cheerful, practically bubbling and me silently bursting with pride when I mentally compared his behaviour with that of the other babies I saw. (That same comparison, incidentally, is why I so confidently assert that his problem is not a serious one.) I also left with considerably more respect for Chinese hospital treatment than I went in with. Chinese hospitals are still a little weak on germ theory, it seems, but surgery and now physiotherapy they're both top-notch at in my opinion.

...on the other hand...

I ended off my last blog post on Sunday with a chipper thing about surprises I like. Today's blog entry is a not-so-happy one.

It starts with happy news, of course. Today marks the third year since Joan, in a weird fit or something, decided that she'd actually spend the rest of her life with me. The fact that I've been blessed with this for three years makes the rest of my life worthwhile. Lucas' addition to the family over fourteen months ago amplifies this.

The event has been overshadowed, however, by some bad news. (Indeed the event almost passed me by unnoticed.) Yesterday Lucas was at the hospital to check into something that worried Joan and her mother. It turns out I should have been worried too.

Lucas' slow development in walking is not because of normal variance in children picking up the skill. He has been diagnosed as having something called "Central Coordination Disturbance". This seems, on my digging, to be a code phrase for "Cerebral Palsy". Specifically, it seems, that the version of CP in question is "Spastic Diplegia". Caught early enough there is treatment for it that can bring it under control and give him a semblance of a normal life in terms of walking, etc. He'll never be graceful or nimble (no world-famous athlete or dancer here), but if the treatment works he'll at least be able to look somewhat normal while walking or possibly even running.

Of course treatment is open-ended and expensive (and, naturally, not at all guaranteed to be effective). How expensive? Savings-account draining expensive. The minimum cost is 4000RMB for a twenty-day course of treatment. I make 4700RMB per month. Do the math and you see bank accounts draining to zero in no time at all. (Thankfully I married someone who is good at saving or there wouldn't be a savings account to even start draining!)

This is the final nail in the coffin of my teaching. I was getting tired of dealing with the spoiled brats of China's wealthy, self-proclaimed elites already. Now I have an added incentive to leave: teaching just doesn't pay enough. It's time to go back into software for real.

Anybody who knows a friend who knows a friend who knows someone who's looking for a seasoned software developer, please feel free to pass on my email address (ttmrichter@gmail.com), my GoogleTalk address (ttmrichter@gmail.com) or my YIM address (michael_richter_1966). I'm in the market again.

Surprises

The growth of a child kind of creeps up on you. You just all of a sudden notice, for example, that the kid you were once able to comfortably hold with one hand and your forearm is now so big that you can't hold him up high enough to keep his feet of your chest while playing on the bed. (You also find out that the kid you used to be able to toss around like a baseball now throws your crippled back when you try it. I learned that the hard way this week.)

It's the intellectual development, however, that sneaks up on you the most quietly, especially in the pre-vocal stage. Its difficult to spot what the child is learning because there's no quick feedback like you'd get if the child could talk.

We got some feedback from Lucas this week.

A long time ago we got this flashcard/book type of affair with pictures of animals in it. Patiently his grandmother, his mother and I would show him pictures and say the name of the animal. (In Chinese at this point. Starting next month he gets the same treatment in English.) At first Lucas was uninterested in them (except for wanting to eat them). After that he just wanted to play with the cards, fanning them out from the rivet that binds them all in one corner, bending them and generally being his destructive self on them. He also enjoyed touching the pictures and running his finger along the edges. There was, however, no sign that he understood the language at all. (That pre-vocal thing and all that.)

Then the hammer dropped this week. While playing with Lucas, Joan asked him (in Chinese) "Where's the dog?". She was, of course, referring to his favourite pal, the Snoopy-like stuffed dog. The cards, however, happened to be out and fanned open and the picture of the dog (a dalmatian) was exposed. Instead of pointing to his favourite pal, Lucas reached across and pointed at the picture of the dog. This sent a wave of excitement through the family and poor Lucas was pestered for the entire length of his attention span (roughly twenty seconds) with "where's the lion?" and "where's the tiger?" and "where's the elephant?" and such questions. He very ably identified the animals (even some of the more difficult ones). He'd confuse the lion and tiger quite often and sometimes got the chimpanzee mixed up with the monkey. But overall his comprehension of those words was better than my Sweathogs' would be given the same vocabulary.

These are the kinds of surprises I like in my life.