The class beside mine has a student that is wheelchair bound. He is so heavy that he needs two grown men to carry him down from the school bus. His mom is an old frail lady who already has trouble walking on her own, so where did she finds the strength to carry him around the house?
It is just amazing how motherhood can transform a self-centered organism into an other-focused caregiver.
Literature Summary.
When you are doing research in this day and age, you begin to really appreciate the fast access and ease of storage of the internet and the PDF format. Unlike the researchers of yesteryear, I am simultaneously nowhere and everywhere, tapping into a large network of scientific and medical archives from across the continent and beyond. My work is no longer confined to a library looking through journals and microfilms, but accessible from any place at any time. No longer is it a necessity to bring home a stack of journals and papers that will ultimately clutter what little space I have. Instead, all of those pages are now neatly stored into a jump drive sitting in the corner of my desk, no bigger than the size of my thumb.
While the joys of technology have brought both practices into the twenty first century, the process of sifting through the information is still and always will be the limiting factor. There is unfortunately no technology that augments our ability to read and understand page after page of research in absolute detail. The only answers for that are time and patience.
Many of the children in the class I am taking this term are diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Though signs and symptoms might slightly vary from one child from another, but all of them experience movement and coordination problems. They may also have other neurological problems such as seizures, intellectual disability and urinary incontinence.
Cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsyis a disorder of movement, muscle tone or posture that is caused by injury or abnormal development in the immature brain, most often before birth.
Signs and symptoms appear during infancy or preschool years. In general, cerebral palsy causes impaired movement associated with exaggerated reflexes or rigidity of the limbs and trunk, abnormal posture, involuntary movements, unsteadiness of walking, or some combination of these. The effect of cerebral palsy on functional abilities varies greatly.
People with cerebral palsy often have other conditions related to developmental brain abnormalities, such as intellectual disabilities, vision and hearing problems, or seizures. A broad spectrum of treatments may help minimize the effect of cerebral palsy and improve a person’s functional abilities.
