The One Where Mom Starts Crying in the Middle of an Eval

Today Beh had the evaluation for his augmentative communication device. It's been a long, long painful wait to get to this point. So many stops and starts, even this week when his original appointment got rescheduled (I gave my appointment to another mom who had been waiting over a year and was going to have to wait yet another month for an appointment because her family was going out of town).

The eval team was a speech therapist and an occupational therapist. And they, wow, they knew their stuff. I don't just mean technology. They knew autism, they knew Beh--even though they'd just met him, they had an uncanny ability to read him and interpret his behaviors.

The speech therapist pulled out the first device to try and said one simple sentence about how Beh could push this button on this screen to communicate. I don't really know what the exact sentence was, but it made me start crying. Right there on my table, in tangible form, was the gateway we'd been searching for for so long. And her one sentence made it sound so simple. Beh just needed to push X and, BOOM, communication. My baby could have a voice, after nine years of searching for it. All of it, in the reach of our grasp, finally. The hope, the relief, the love were too much for my heart to contain and poured out in tears. LOL, it was embarrassing. I choked out an apology, saying that it was just that we'd hoped for this for so long. "Don't apologize," the OT said, "This is what we're here for."

I composed myself, and we got to work. We went through several devices, all of which were tablet-based. The challenge was finding one that didn't lead to too much stimming due to Beh's hyperlexia. We had to actually hide a few buttons because he was stimming so much (he especially liked hitting "the" and the pluralizing "s" button because it threw the software off--it would simply spell out T-H-E-S because it did not know how to pronounce the nonsense word).

We finally found a good fit for Beh's needs. It's the Accent 800 with Word Power software. It's about the size of an iPad mini. It's so cool. It relies on pictures paired with words because the words alone were too much to stim on for Beh. Here it is:



This baby is $5,995 of awesome. He'll be able to take it with him wherever he goes.

It will be awhile still before that happens, though. There's still a lot more waiting. First, the claim will be submitted to our primary insurance, and they have 60 days to deny the claim, approve the claim, or approve a portion of the claim. After that, the claim for any remainder the private insurance doesn't cover will be submitted to Medicaid, and they have 30 days to decide (which shouldn't be a problem since the state already approved the device). So we have up to 90 days of just waiting on the insurance.

If all goes well there, we enter the training phase. It is going to take a lot of time to teach Beh how to use the software to communicate. Everyone on Beh's team--therapists, behavior coaches, teachers, parents--will need to be trained on how to help Beh communicate with it.

But today I'm not thinking about all the work that is before us; today I'm just basking in thankfulness and peace because this leg of the race is over. No more fighting and wrangling to make this happen. All of that ugliness is done. We have hope and a promise for the future. We have an Accent 800 :)