Day 88 – Grayson’s Condition

Dear family and friends

Today Grayson was better than yesterday. Inappropriate behavior was significantly less, and that is certainly good. At this point in his redevelopment, he needs to use more socially acceptable ways to express himself. Just as we sometimes wish to do something wild when we get upset, our social governor kicks in and prevents us from doing something inappropriate. Grayson needs to build a new social governor to invoke when something upsets him.

Continuing the review of Grayson's evaluation, tonight's topic is language and speech.

Grayson is minimally to moderately impaired in his ability to communicate and understand. His ability to sustain attention is significantly impaired, and this interferes with his ability to participate in and gain full benefit from this therapy. As you can tell from this video from January 30th, his speech is poorly articulated making him difficult to understand. While we have noticed some improvement in this area, multiple repetitions are sometimes required in order for him to get his message across.

Grayson has significant deficits in the area of memory – especially short term and working. He also is displaying deficits in problem solving, processing speed, reasoning and categorization. Much of this can be related back to the memory issue, as it requires both storage and recall to be able to solve multi-step problems. Today, this is way beyond Grayson.

I want to make sure that you all realize that this is the "is" condition for Grayson today, not a predictor of the future. With hard work in therapy over a period of time, some of these deficits may improve. Time and hard work will tell just who Grayson will be.

Pax!

Brant