June
2011
Zoom!0
I mentioned a while ago that I had asked Dorrie’s PT for suggestions of equipment that might not have any theraputic benefit, but which would be fun for her to play on. Eventually, after looking through a bunch of special needs catalogs, we both thought that the Tumbleforms JettMobile might be something Dorrie could use.
So we asked Dorrie’s DME vendor if they could bring one over so we could try it out. They cost about $600 so we certainly didn’t want to order one without seeing how she looked on it. They weren’t sure they could, but our sales rep managed to wrangle one for a couple of days from a teacher she knows, and brought over so we could have a look.
Dorrie thought it was pretty cool, and more importantly, in spite of the awkward looking setup, it looks to us like she really will be able to use it to push around on the floor and be more mobile than she has been pushing herself around on her back. It will hopefully also spare her poor ear, which tends to look pretty red after a day of sliding around on it.
So the next step was to contact our area agency (an organization that provides support services for people with special needs and their families. I believe at least partially funded by state money but I’m not entirely sure how that works) and see if they had any funding we could access to help pay for it. Normally we’d go through Dorrie’s insurance for this, but she already has a mobility device (her chair) and everyone was in agreement that they wouldn’t authorize it. Since we’re going to need another chair within the next year or two, we didn’t want to risk jeopardizing the future funding for that. In any case, we submitted our quick application and a couple of weeks later they came back and said they would cover part! (Now we might be able to afford a swing, too!) So we went ahead and ordered… haven’t heard yet when it’s expected in, but we’re all very excited.