At Alpine, we had our monthly parent meeting on Tuesday and at that point he was averaging 120 spontaneous mands per day (last month was 80) and 178 spontaneous tacts per day (last month was 98). So significant increase in verbals, which thrills us. I've rerun the numbers to include this week and the month is now averaging 128 spontaneous mands per day and 182 spontaneous tacts.
Sentences are coming along. Every day his therapists tell me about something he put in a sentence of 4+ words. So we are making progress. He's mastered following 3 step functional commands with no prompting (this is HUGE). For example : "go get a paper towel, grab your snack, and sit down".
Behaviors have dropped to less than half of what they were last month, with some days having none at all. Which is also nice.
Alpine is "fast tracking" some of Dominics programs (actions, object labels and shapes). What that means is instead of him having to perform the mass trial with the same stimuli at 100% 4 days in a row to call an item mastered before moving into random rotation with it, they are incorporating RR with MT and only requiring 2 days of mastery with the MT. I think. It was kind of confusing when she explained it. Anywho, it means he'll be able to move through his programs and aquire targets more quickly
The improvements are also holding steady at D11 - he's been hovering ~200 spontaneous verbals per day there. The other day he did a cute craft - he cut a bat out of construction paper and glued it together. Given how many months it took us to get his fine motor skills up to par for cutting (really only mastered it a few months ago), we were very impressed.
I have over the last week or so decreased the level of antifungal dosage from 10TB to 5TB. We'll knock it down to 3TB this weekend and make sure the verbals hold steady next week, then take it down again. Goal is to get back in the 1-3tsp range for maintenance. Then, once we're happy and in maintenance on the antifungal, we are going to trial adding casien back to his diet in the form of cheese, and see how he does with occasional cheese. (he's okay with occasional soy, we've learned). It certainly won't be a daily feature, but it would be nice to have a little more dietary flexibility. I'd like to get yogurt in there too.
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Edited to add - Age of Autism article is really worth reading today. Lisa Joyce is a facebook friend of mine in the trenches with a vaccine injured child, and here is my gut level, end of a LONG week, response to this quote from the article linked:
"My friend didn't heal her daughter by trusting her gut or her "intuition," she did it by researching and pursuing treatment for her from the best physicians in the country--real MDs who are treating "immune compromise" and mitochondrial dysfunction. This family is two years ahead of us on this journey. If given the chance to speak with them I imagine this reporter would surmise that their daughter was probably mistakenly diagnosed and never had autism in the first place. Because that's what we are told when we drain our 401K's, sell our houses and our cars and live paycheck to paycheck to get our kids better. It's what everyone needs to believe. Thousands upon thousands of us just made it all up. No matter how many more seemingly healthy kids get sick. And die. "
My response is - Enjoy your denial while it lasts my friends. Because autism doesn't discriminate, and you better hope that if its YOUR kid with the next vaccine injury, there are still people available to help you who know things to try. Its not just the doc's who think outside the box who're be hunted down... its the FDA regulating nutritional supplements, its the HBOT places being closed down... and on and on....
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