Things have remained pretty busy over here, so I am going to keep this post short and sweet. Yep, it was strep. He’s been on antibiotics for more than a week now. And the appointment to be tested with his primary care made it clear there’s yet another thing we need to help him learn how to tolerate: strep swabbing.

He has only ever been tested for strep once, several years ago when he was much younger, and he had to be held down then. I had to hold him down this time too because he got really scared by it, and with his throat hurting I imagine he wasn’t feeling as receptive to anybody touching back there. He tolerated every other part of the exam calmly, including looking at his ears and listening to his lungs. He let them put the blood pressure cuff on and pump it up. Aside from the sadness that gave me to see that we needed to hold him down to get this done, I recognize it won’t be sustainable as he continues to grow.

And so, another habilitative therapy desensitization goal was born. I bought some swabs of an appropriate length from Amazon, and we started working with them today. Because I have done so much work for other types of swabbing (like COVID testing, which he is now fully tolerating without reinforcement), the progression on this for today has gone pretty quickly.

I started with touching his lip, and then when he was tolerating that well for part of the session I moved to asking him to let me quickly touch the tip of his tongue with the swab. Then we progressed to touching the side of the mouth back towards his molars and then to rubbing for a couple seconds in that area. In time we will progress to moving towards touching the areas pertinent for testing with the swabs. This is something that has to be done gently and carefully so that swelling and/or irritation isn’t caused, so we won’t work on it more than once a week.

As many things as we have worked on that he’s now tolerating (recently he’s progressed to calm acceptance of an anesthesia mask on his face while laying down without his kindle for a full minute, with lavender oil in it to help with the expectation for possible odors), there’s still so many things still to be done. We also worked on sunglasses today, with the longest he will keep them on being 2 minutes right now. I know sunglasses aren’t strictly necessary, but if he should ever need glasses for his vision, this will be an important one too.

And, though it’s random, I found out more than just what else we might need to work on in therapy this past week. Tony likes the song “California Love.” Sometimes if a song comes on the radio and I see him moving his head to the music or clapping, I ask him…and this was the case here too, and he was pretty emphatic and enthusiastic about it. So on my Spotify liked list it went. These moments mean a lot to me because they give me glimpses into his own unique personality. That’s not a song I generally listen to, he definitely has his own likes and preferences outside of what he gets exposed to a lot from my listening tastes.

And now I am headed off to get ready to do more therapy. I wish you all a wonderful week ahead! <3 Ari