KKI - Day 4

The past few days have been busy, but also feel like they've moved so slowly. Hudson's behavior has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, probably due to anxiety, stress of the new environment and people, boredom, and lack of sleep. His tantrums, hitting, kicking, and autistic behaviors are terrible, much worse than I've seen them in a very long time. After the few days of baseline testing, feeding sessions progressed to a toy preference assessment. The therapists presented him with a variety of toys, in a very methodical fashion, in order to determine what objects might work best as positive feeding reinforcements. After that was determined, the sessions have moved on to lessening bite refusal. The therapist presents an empty spoon to him, if he resists it, the spoon is taken away immediately for ten seconds, and then presented again. If he doesn't resist, he gets verbal praise and gets to play with a toy. This is repeated 30 times. So far, for the past two days, Hudson hasn't gotten to play with any toys. Tomorrow something different will be happening, but I'm not sure what yet. He also had one MRSA culture come back negative, and we're waiting on the second culture now. His stomach is a mess, rock hard and bloated, and his motility is at a standstill. He's been very retchy and gaggy, so the team added milk of magnesia back into his daily meds. He hasn't been on that since before the Cdiff nightmare of last year. We've met some of the other feeding families, and yesterday went to Port Discovery with them on our Therapeutic Leave of Absence (TLOA) hours. It's basically a giant hands on childrens museum type place, very cool. Hudson tried to climb into the water table. We actually get more TLOA hours than I initially thought, we get 4 hours twice a week. Most people take them on the weekends. Today we ventured out by ourselves to Whole Foods. After driving through a scary part of town, we arrived in Fells Point, where Whole Foods is. I was pretty proud of myself for navigating us there, only getting lost once! The change in scenery was essential for Hudson and I, as tomorrow marks the start of our first full week here. Wish us luck!