What’s in a diagnosis?

First, some pictures of Nathan with cousins Matias and Claudia, taken on Saturday night:

I’m waiting for my cousin to send me the rest of the pictures that we took in Buenos Aires.

Today I wanted to talk about a diagnosis. Some days ago, in my Mission Impossible post, I wondered if maybe the fact that Nathan had so many diagnosis and so many different levels of damage to his brain meant that his capacity for growth and development was limited.

During therapy today Ramon and I were talking and he mentioned that Nathan is currently his “toughest” case – all of the other kids he’s seeing and has seen in the last couple of months have shown more progress than Nathan. So I asked him if he thought it was possibly because of all of Nathan’s diagnoses – Holoprosencephaly, Hydrocephalus, Bacterial Meningitis, Polymicrogiria, etc. He gave me a very interesting answer.

He told me that he has seen children that have a perfect MRI and perfect everything – who have progressed less than Nathan. Other children he’s seen that have atrocious looking brains – whom he’s gotten walking. He learned many years ago NEVER to judge a child by what their brain looks or by how much damage they have. Diagnosis means nothing in Ramon’s world.

What matters is the child himself. Does this child’s brain respond to the treatment? What is this child’s rate of improvement? Based on these factors, he determines whether he can help these children or not.

Which is almost exactly what my cousin, who is a very reputable anesthesiologist in Buenos Aires, told me when we talked about Nathan. She looked at his latest MRI scans and told me that the brain that she was seeing looked like that of a vegetative, non-functional child. The fact that Nathan is who he is today shows that his brain is incredibly flexible and able to adapt. She told me to KEEP MOVING FORWARD and continue stimulating and she believes he has a lot of potential.

I wanted to share this today because it’s very easy for us as mothers to allow a diagnosis to determine our expectations of our children. It’s easy to believe that because their brain looks a certain way that we can only expect certain things of them. Today I learned that this is a complete fallacy. Today I learned to not dwell on a diagnosis and simply to look at a child’s potential because of the adaptability of the human brain.

What’s in a diagnosis? Limitations. If we see beyond our kid’s diagnosis, we can see potential.