Paraphrasing the Hydrocephalus Association's Teacher Guide: Learning Disabilities (Part 3)

 The last two sub-sections are motor skills, and organizational skills. I'm going to keep both pretty limited, and then do more research,and post about the same subjects later on. I've posted about motor skills talking about my own personal skills during my first year of blogging which can be found by clicking on motor skills label at the end of the post. I've just recently started to figure out how to write about organizational skills in depth through mentoring, and I plan to work on that soon.

 

The three kinds of motor skills that tend to be effected with children with hydrocephalus is psycho-motor coordination, fine motor skills, and visual motor skills. According to the Teacher's Guide psycho-motor skills shows in clumsiness, and not being aware of how much space their body occupies.The guide was most specific with fine motor skills effecting writing but it also includes cutting with scissors, tracing, artwork, and participating in games. Children with hydrocephalus may have problems with printing and writing cursive. Their handwriting may be in poor quality and unevenly spaced. They may also write slowly compared to their peers. The hydrocephalus association encourages using computers for all writing assignments, but from experience that might not be financially available, and may cause their handwriting to be worse later on. With the visual motor skills section I'll have to do more research on it, and include it in another post because of my inability to understand what the Teacher's Guide means by everything. What I do understand is that it includes not being able to tell distance and direction. The distance part I've always assumed was poor depth perception because of my eyes. The direction part is another thing I want to research more about, and post later on. Another part of the poor visual motor skills is having trouble keeping in the lines when coloring, and finding their place on a page. Another thing they have problem with is spatial orientation which includes having problems telling the difference between left and right, over and under, and backward and forward. 

Children with hydrocephalus may have problems following with one step. The next paragraph mentions that may have trouble understanding the information as a whole, and finding the meaning of it. So the two things are most likely related. It may affect the neatness and quality of their work. It also means trying to understand every detail instead of the information of a whole which quickly turns into a information overload. According to the Teacher's Guide this may result in them using familiar habits or routines to cope which resembles misbehavior, inattentiveness, or laziness when it's really the opposite. 

I was diagnosed late, and a big part of what was affected was my motor skills being worse than what is considered to be normal. The only other person with hydrocephalus that I know that I could really compare this to has cerebral palsy, so it's really hard to tell how much of a difference it is. But with the part about telling the difference between left and right is something that is still a problem, at least when attempting to give directions. But when I was younger I couldn't tell the difference between my left and right shoes. 

Source: https://www.hydroassoc.org/docs/A_Teachers_Guide_to_Hydrocephalus.pdf

Also this a post I wrote the first time I was working on my job describing how I discovered my lack of sense of direction: https://timothy-landry.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-i-found-out-i-have-no-sense-of.html

Importance of therapies early on instead of later from personal experience

I meant to write this on Friday but I've been keeping busy at work so I haven't had much time to put a post together. I've also been nervous about writing this specific post so I've been putting it off but I feel it's something that really has to be said. I spent the majority of my childhood in Speech Therapy and was given the option to stop my Freshman year of High School even if I was no where near finishing the program, and I definitely wouldn't have before graduation. I was given that option because I was pulled out of class for Speech Therapy and it that itself was a bigger problem than it was in Junior High and especially Elementary School. I sort of regret of not taking Speech Therapy for the rest of High School but now that I've been backsliding again it might not have mattered later on. My speech impediment hasn't stopped me from finding jobs. I went through a few jobs before settling with Kroger and got promoted during the time I've been having Hydrocephalus related medical problems and while my speech has been backsliding.

Even though I'm not willing to go into much detail about it writing on a public site, what I regret now is the lack of Occupational Therapy when a lot of the focus was on  Speech Therapy. I had it in Preschool and then during a two year period when I was in the 5th grade and into Junior High in the form of Adaptive P.E but I wish I would have been offered more. I'm not sure how much the school district offered though, and my parents wouldn't have been able to afford if it wasn't something they would have had to pay for. I'm able to do that majority of my job without a problem but I run into problems when I have to do something that has to do with fine motor skills. I've been offered Occupational Therapy recently but working 5 or 6 days a week and almost full time it's something I don't have time for. I need to keep my availability open as much as possible too so it would be tough to schedule it on a regular basis.

The point of this post is a warning to Parents of children with Hydrocephalus or younger people with it to consider Occupational Therapy if it's not already being provided because problems fine motor skills and other similar problems will just be worse in the work force. I know that there's a lot of people with Hydrocephalus and with some it's obvious it wouldn't be possible early on. But with many people with Hydrocephalus it is possible to lead a pretty normal life. Thanks for reading, and I helped and encouraged others. If you want to know about my specific struggles with fine motor skills at work feel free to send me a E-mail or contact me on the social networking sites where I post links to my blog.

 http://kidshealth.org/parent/system/ill/occupational_therapy.html

 http://kidshealth.org/parent/system/ill/speech_therapy.html

 http://www.hydroassoc.org/docs/A_Teachers_Guide_to_Hydrocephalus.pdf

neurological side effects of brain surgery and injury

Today I'm going to talk about neurological side effects to hydrocephalus or brain injury and surgery in general.Info on some of them can easily be found online,but others not so much.The ones I have no sources for are ones that I've always struggled with and I've met or known of other people who have hydrocephalus,or had brain surgery for another reason.I'm also going to talk some about how they effected my life either in school  hoping to help others in the same situation.I've discovered that alot of these side effects are easier to deal with and overcome when you know exactly what your dealing with and why,instead of just being confused.

Some of the ones that can easily be found online are memory problems,balance and coordination problems.Others that happen when certain parts of the brain are damaged during surgery are speech,vision and muscle strength.Then there are more severe side effects like nerve damage,paralysis,clinical depression and seizures.At time other brain surgery or injury can cause different neurological disorders (hydrocephalus,epilepsy,and chiari malformation just to name a few).Other side effects that are hard to find online are problems with organization,keeping and breaking habits,clumsiness and not being able to focus.

Out of thesen the ones I've personally struggled with are speech,vision,muscle strength,memory problems,balance,coordination,organization skills,keeping/breaking habits,and clumsiness.For me though speech,muscle strength,and clumsiness all has to do with ataxia.Balance and coordination at least seemed to only have little effect at school or work,only in smaller situations like when I attemped to learn how to ride a bike or when climbing stairs.However with the others at school  they've gone from being a bunch of small problems to one big problem.For example my organization problem and my inability to keep a habit made me struggle to keep my backpack organized and the result of that was a bunch of homework assignments in the bottom of my backpack and crumpled to the point to where it was ruined.My memory didn't help either because by the time I would get home not only was I not able to develop the habit of doing my homework,but I would have forgotten what I was supposed to do.Another way my memory affected my school work is that it made me struggle to be able to study or even read a textbook.My inability to keep a habit caused me to struggle to keep up with some homework assignments that included a daily activity.

I'm going to continue to talk about this subject on Thursday.I'm going to focus more on how it's affected me at work,and hopefully I'll be able to find more info on other side effects before then.Thanks for reading :)