Tessa had a quick shot MRI done on Friday, June 3. We saw her neurosurgeon immediately afterwards who discussed her scan with us. It was awesome that we were able to see the results so fast. We literally had the MRI, walked across the street to his office, and he had them on a laptop for us to look at. It was maybe 30 minutes from the time she was scanned to the time we saw the pictures. Pretty cool!
Dr. C, her neurosurgeon, said her scans looked great. He said one of the big things they look for is brain regrowth, and she has had a lot of that. Her ventricles have decompressed and the brain has filled in and expanded where the water was. She does have one pocket of fluid but the doctor said it is to be expected that some fluid would still remain given the severity of her hydrocephalus before she had her shunt placed. They also think she is missing about a third of her corpus callosum, but Dr. C said she may compensate for what she’s missing and just use the tracks she has. He said there are some people missing the whole thing that appear to be fine outwardly. Obviously, the excess fluid she had probably prevented it from fully developing before she was born, plus the brain didn’t have time to develop to full term anyway since she required an early delivery (8 weeks). The doctor said she is developing beautifully, too. We couldn’t really expect her to be doing much better than she is. She is pretty much a normal 1 year old who just so happens to have a shunt.
Developmentally, she’s trucking right along! She is crawling and just in the last couple of weeks is starting to do it more and more, and faster (she’s been quite proficient at the GI/belly crawl for awhile). She’s got some strong little legs, too. She is pulling herself to a standing position and starting to cruise a little bit as well. I call her my little daredevil—nothing seems to scare her and she’ll try crawling or climbing up on to anything. She is getting very interested in books and loves to play with the kids at her daycare. She is really social, has started to wave and give kisses, and is starting to say some words, mostly “Dusty” (our dog’s name, who she absolutely adores).
Also, her occupational and physical therapists say she is doing great. In fact, the OT said a couple of weeks ago that pretty soon she won’t be able to come anymore because Tessa is just doing everything so well. Even though we love our OT, I said, “Well, that’s ultimately what we want, isn’t it?”
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