New Doctor Doctor

We’ve had fortunately few medical visits so far. Aside from my panicked journey to the pediatrician over Abbie’s First Stomach Virus, most of our children’s trips to the doctor have been for regularly scheduled checkups.* Plus our pediatrician is in the hospital within walking distance of our home, meaning that I don’t have to repeatedly load and unload children, strollers, snacks, toys, diaper paraphernalia, and any clothing they removed on the ride over; I just have to do it once when leaving the house.

Sadly my easy life at home is leaving me even faster than my sanity. With a 2-year-old girl who should be doing things that she’s not, and two 6-month-old boys who were born eight weeks early with all of the developmental concerns that go with it, I’m becoming one of those parents who has to have a calendar to track which kid sees which doctor on which day. I’m going to be in trouble when the kids are old enough to participate in sports, dance lessons, art class, volunteer work, or whatever other extracurricular activity I vicariously force them into.

The first new doctor we saw was a developmental pediatrician to diagnose why Abbie isn’t talking. We left the twins with a neighbor, and drove the five or so miles to a completely different hospital. That might not sound like much, but it’s like 50 times farther than we have to travel for our regular pediatrician.

The doctor and her nurse ran several analyses on Abbie. They did a full Denver developmental examination, a test named after its inventor Bob Denver. After fully testing her abilities and believing our claims that she really can kick and throw a ball one-handed, they concluded that she is developmentally at or above every age-appropriate milestone that doesn’t involve saying anything. They measured her head to determine that everything is in the proportional location that it should be for maximum intellect and cuteness. I assume they watched our interactions with her to ensure that we weren’t doing anything detrimental to her speech development like grunting and pinching a lot to grab her attention.

After a solid morning of analysis, the doctor gave us a definitive “I don’t know.” She could rule out plenty of things that would keep her from talking. For example, it’s not a pervasive development delay since her developmental delay is isolated to speech and not, um, pervasive. She eliminated the worst disorders as best she could for such a young girl, gave us a couple things to work on, and told us to keep an eye on her. She also offered to refer us to another specialist at the University of Iowa hospital two hours away who could potentially tell us dozens of other maladies that Abbie doesn’t have. We’re going to wait on that trip.

Coming up on the calendar, we have trips to an eye doctor in the western suburbs and a hearing specialist in the northern suburbs. Hopefully they can definitively tell us that all of our children are healthy, or can at least specifically tell us what’s wrong and how to fix it. If I have to go to the trouble of taking the car, I want results.

* Those four months of home care visits for the twins don’t count since we didn’t have to leave the house for the nurse to prick them on a monthly basis. I also have to ignore the twins’ NICU time to keep this distinction, but once again it’s not like I had to take them anywhere to see the NICU doctors. Oh, and the dentist doesn’t count because, well, you know.