The Umbrella Kid

Well they do say when it rains it pours.  In my house umbrellas aren't just for preventing rain from soaking you.  We live under the umbrella of diagnoses in our home.  It's part of the joys of living with a medically complex kiddo.

Cary Lynn is a medical enigma.  She delights in 3 am solos, her stuffed animals, and keeping doctors scratching their heads.

An umbrella diagnosis is where they take a whole bunch of problems, group them all together, and say voila!!  Here you go, take a whack a doodle at that!  I kid you not.  I sometimes think the way they come up with these things involve a dart board, stiff rounds of expensive scotch, and a parker brother's Ouija board.  They sit together, take some shots, consult the position of the stars, and make lots of notes in Latin so it looks like they know what they are talking about.  Then they have meetings, press conferences, and write it down in big medical journals.  Which are passed on to doctors and nurses who present the information to us while they try to look like they perfectly understand what is going on with my child.

Cary Lynn has many, many, many diagnoses.  I kid you not.  Last time her chart was updated she was up to 30.  Some are little and frankly not worth the space they take up on paper.  But some are bigger.

Three of her biggies are umbrella diagnoses.  Cerebral Palsy is considered an umbrella diagnosis.  CP is a large disability category.   For some people in the CP umbrella the only trace of it you see is they hold a pencil a little funny.  On the other end of the umbrella you have children like my daughter who cannot roll, sit, or do a lot independently.

The other one is CVI.  This one is also a big big umbrella.  From children who function so well visually that you would never know to children who are very visually impaired.  Cary Lynn falls right about in the middle of this one.

The last one is a new diagnosis that we just got official confirmation of last week.  Dysautonomia. It's a big word, but once again I'm stuck in umbrella land.  If you look up the definition you will even see in several places that it is defined as an umbrella term where the autonomic nervous system malfunctions.  It can range from mild issues like gi track problems to Parkinson's disease.  I sat down with neurology and had a very long and fun filled round of what type might Cary Lynn have. Because there is a really big difference.  There is the kind that you treat the symptoms and go on slogging or there is progressive.  In the case of the latter it's not a good prognosis.  At this point the medical community is still consulting the dartboard and the Ouija to figure out what category Cary Lynn is in.

I hate being grumpy and disgruntled.  But in a way I really am.  To me an umbrella diagnosis isn't a real diagnosis.  I am the type of person who really wants a clear cut answer.  So I know what to do to fix or at least stabilize the problem.  Instead I get a lot of running around the bush and unhelpful handouts.  And the run of the mill advice like, keep doing therapy.  To me that is the equivalent of patting a small child on the head and sending them off with a lolly pop in hopes that they have pacified the child and made them forget the problem at large.  So it makes me kind of mad that the same old tired things keep getting trotted out.

But the other part of me knows that they really don't know.  Cary Lynn lived.  She defied medical odds at 24 weeks.  She defied medical odds when she first came to live with us.  Every day she lives she defies another odd.  Everything that she does that they told me she would never do.  From the day she grabbed a toy to the day she took simple steps with support she continues to remind me that I dwell with a miracle.  The doctors are by and large clueless about my child and so many other children like her.

So while I'm not overly thrilled that I have to endure another umbrella diagnosis and I'm not going to give up hope that someday we may have better answers than darts and scotch can provide I'm going to take it one day at a time and watch my little odd buster continue to blaze new trails and set the world on fire.



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Amy Fields is a wife, mother of two special needs kids, and very late putting a post up!  You can follow her on her blog Many Kinds of Families