Lincoln's Medical Bills
Donation protected
I know everyone that makes a GoFund me page says this but I really hate asking people for help, but I choose to swallow my pride for my little guy.
My pregnancy with Lincoln was pretty much the same as his brothers, uneventful. This is really everything you would hope for in a pregnancy while chasing around two crazy boys. We only started to notice he wasn’t progressing in his development as he should have been, and everyone said “oh it’s only because he has two big brothers he is just watching them, he will be where he needs to be soon”. Well soon didn’t come for Lincoln, he wasn’t walking until he was almost 20 months, he was sitting at around 10 months, didn’t say his first word until be was almost 3, we took him to the doctor… so many doctors visits. They thought he wasn’t speaking due to multiple ear infections, so we took him in for ear tubes and had an ABR (which is a test to check to see if the brain understands the sounds as it should, basically looking for hearing loss, which this test was thankfully normal). He also had an MRI looking for other possible causes for his significant delay in talking, everything was normal. So this was the point where the diagnoses of apraxia came into the picture, since there was no physical reason. Apraxia is a speech sound disorder. Someone with apraxia has trouble saying what he or she wants to say correctly and consistently. Apraxia is a neurological disorder that affects the brain pathways involved in planning the sequence of movements involved in producing speech. The brain knows what it wants to say, but cannot properly plan and sequence the required speech sound movements. Well at least we had a diagnosis, right? Wrong, the thing with apraxia is there is not treatment, only continued speech therapy and making sure his ears are working the way in which our good Lord intended. So along with Lincoln’s three surgeries for tubes, he had a perforation in his ear drum from the tube falling out and his little ear drum not repairing itself. So in the past year he has also had 2 surgeries to repair this perforation, because of course the first one didn’t close up the hole the way it needed it to. We have so much to be grateful for with our little Lincoln: he is a spit fire, he won’t put up with anyone’s bologna including his bothers, and he makes his option heard even though he has to scream and cry to get his point across. He continues to improve daily with his speech even though there are times that we have to calm him down to figure out what he needs. I can’t imagine the frustration he experiences on a daily basis with knowing what he wants to say and not being able to get the words out. I always think of someone that has had a stroke and knows exactly what they want to say and can’t say it, hopefully there would be another form of communication for an adult that had a stroke. But for Lincoln this is just the way it has always been, he often uses his hands to tell you a story or to help you figure out what he is talking about. He is the funniest little boy you would ever meet, he loves the 3 Stooges; he laughs and laughs at the slap stick comedy. He loves playing with his puppy and his brothers and is really enjoys when they show him how to play one of their games. The most recent game is Minecraft. Lincoln is up to maybe 100 words, which really varies, one day he is able to say something and the next day he can’t repeat it again, that is his apraxia rearing its ugly head. As you can imagine not having great health insurance, we have really raked up the medical bills, as of now we are getting close to $7000 in medical debt. We have exhausted free speech therapy resources. Lincoln gets speech at school, and also therapy two times weekly through the hospital.
My pregnancy with Lincoln was pretty much the same as his brothers, uneventful. This is really everything you would hope for in a pregnancy while chasing around two crazy boys. We only started to notice he wasn’t progressing in his development as he should have been, and everyone said “oh it’s only because he has two big brothers he is just watching them, he will be where he needs to be soon”. Well soon didn’t come for Lincoln, he wasn’t walking until he was almost 20 months, he was sitting at around 10 months, didn’t say his first word until be was almost 3, we took him to the doctor… so many doctors visits. They thought he wasn’t speaking due to multiple ear infections, so we took him in for ear tubes and had an ABR (which is a test to check to see if the brain understands the sounds as it should, basically looking for hearing loss, which this test was thankfully normal). He also had an MRI looking for other possible causes for his significant delay in talking, everything was normal. So this was the point where the diagnoses of apraxia came into the picture, since there was no physical reason. Apraxia is a speech sound disorder. Someone with apraxia has trouble saying what he or she wants to say correctly and consistently. Apraxia is a neurological disorder that affects the brain pathways involved in planning the sequence of movements involved in producing speech. The brain knows what it wants to say, but cannot properly plan and sequence the required speech sound movements. Well at least we had a diagnosis, right? Wrong, the thing with apraxia is there is not treatment, only continued speech therapy and making sure his ears are working the way in which our good Lord intended. So along with Lincoln’s three surgeries for tubes, he had a perforation in his ear drum from the tube falling out and his little ear drum not repairing itself. So in the past year he has also had 2 surgeries to repair this perforation, because of course the first one didn’t close up the hole the way it needed it to. We have so much to be grateful for with our little Lincoln: he is a spit fire, he won’t put up with anyone’s bologna including his bothers, and he makes his option heard even though he has to scream and cry to get his point across. He continues to improve daily with his speech even though there are times that we have to calm him down to figure out what he needs. I can’t imagine the frustration he experiences on a daily basis with knowing what he wants to say and not being able to get the words out. I always think of someone that has had a stroke and knows exactly what they want to say and can’t say it, hopefully there would be another form of communication for an adult that had a stroke. But for Lincoln this is just the way it has always been, he often uses his hands to tell you a story or to help you figure out what he is talking about. He is the funniest little boy you would ever meet, he loves the 3 Stooges; he laughs and laughs at the slap stick comedy. He loves playing with his puppy and his brothers and is really enjoys when they show him how to play one of their games. The most recent game is Minecraft. Lincoln is up to maybe 100 words, which really varies, one day he is able to say something and the next day he can’t repeat it again, that is his apraxia rearing its ugly head. As you can imagine not having great health insurance, we have really raked up the medical bills, as of now we are getting close to $7000 in medical debt. We have exhausted free speech therapy resources. Lincoln gets speech at school, and also therapy two times weekly through the hospital.
Organizer
Jessica Steele
Organizer
Duluth, MN