Amber Update

I know a few of you have been as anxious as I about what the Neuropsychologist had to say about Amber's diagnosis. Today my big question was answered-but not really.

Here is the summary-it's pretty long-but really I did condense as much as I could while still explaining everything.

So he started off by saying that he had the most difficult time diagnosing her because she is a unique case. She has a few symptoms that fall under the Autism spectrum-PDD-NOS, which she would be considered very high funtioning-at the same time she demonstrates abilities that Autistic children do not have. She shows some ADHD combined type symptoms as well-but not enough to place her under that category.
The clear answer for sure is that for her language and speech delay Amber has
Mixed Expressive/ Receptive Language Disorder and Phonological Disorder.

Temporarily her diagnosis is PDD-NOS /ADHD-NOS under the Autism Spectrum-primarily because she isn't strongly anything at the moment and hopefully in the next year or two-another more precise diagnosis will be found. PDD-NOS is Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified.

The good news is that whatever she is...she has a high probability of Resolving it.
Her language once developed to the same level of her peers will ofcourse help her in all areas across the board and with this-as it's the language part of concepts that Amber scored low on. The Dr. told me that most likely by age 10-12 Amber will pretty much be a normal functioning child with very few developmental differences compared to others her age. So this was a good thing to hear-obviously any parent would want to hear news like this. Her brain receives information correctly-it's more how she responses to use that information that is her problem right now.

So from here-we continue with Speech Therapy both in and out of school and we start meeting with an occupational therapist to help Amber with her sensory processing.

The funny thing I learned today was that they had Amber tested on her Right/Left hand skill level.....so we all think she's left handed because she writes with her left..but to my surprise, Amber is highly funtioning with both on a high average and scored higher with her right? CRAZY..so pretty much she's ambidextrous, which I kind of figured-but I didn't know she was stronger with her right-weird. And her Visual Motor skills are actually really advanced for her age.