Quitting her intensive early

I imagined Eloise’s first intensive therapy program would be 2-3 weeks and, well, intensive. Surprisingly, we decided yesterday to end Eloise’s first intensive after just 2 days.

Why?

Basically, this program didn’t make sense for Eloise.

Even if we’d been able to stay there overnight (gosh lodging in Haapsalu is EXPENSIVE in the summer!), I’m still not sure we would have done the full week.

You see, as the program director noted yesterday, Eloise’s usual weekly therapy schedule is already fairly intensive — Eloise gets 3 sessions of physiotherapy and 2 sessions of occupational therapy here.

Because we’d never tried Haapsalu’s intensive therapy, I didn’t know what to expect.

Would they have special machines to help her walk? Try out gait trainers? Do therapy hooking her up to bungee cords? Learn how to do physiotherapy in a pool? Have sensory vision rooms? Vibration therapy? Music therapy? Massage therapy? I’d seen pictures of many of these things on their website, and I’d seen many other kids in other countries doing things like this. Which is why I imagined the program would be wildly different from a normal therapy week for Eloise.

But. Well. That was not the case.

This week, Haapsalu could only offer the exact same two therapy types she already does here. And, because Estonia is so small and therapists usually train with the same teachers, most therapists do quite similar things. So not only were the therapies the same, but for 3 of the 5 days, they could only offer one single therapy session per day — it didn’t make sense to drive 3 hours each day for that.

Yesterday the directors mentioned Haapsalu probably wasn’t the best fit to help speed Eloise’s development because it’s so similar to her normal regime. I agreed. However, I did ask if we finish the 3 days of this week at a later date, if we could at least try to do 2 physiotherapy sessions per day to see how she tolerates it. They agreed. So that’s where we left things.

Am I disappointed this intensive didn’t work out? Of course.

But now we know. And we hope she wants to keep working.