I forgot to share some excellent news – Nathan’s Dynavox trial has been approved! He will get a dynavox in 2 week so we can “trial” it for 1 month! Once you’re approved for a trial, it’s pretty much a given that he will be approved for his own device. How Amazing! I’ll post a video of him using it as soon as we have it. If you haven’t seen him using it, here’s an example:
It took some wiggling and tickling to get the job done. First we were told by our CCS rep that Nathan had to be enrolled in the CCS MTU to qualify for a dynavox. So we went through the rigamarole of getting him enrolled. Then we had to wait 30 days for an appointment to see their doctor. After we saw their doctor I was told I had to wait for a signed dictation of the appointment so we could go on to the next step – the evaluation by the Augmentative Communication expert. Well I started calling them a week after the appointment, and was told I had to wait a bit. Another week later – please keep waiting. Another week – they had the document, but it wasn’t signed. Another week, it would be signed next week. Well you can imagine how furious I was that after 6 weeks, we still hadn’t moved past this stage! I called PAI and spoke to one of their lawyers and was told I could disenroll him from the MTU and deal with their main office. So I called the local MTU and told them to go to (insert any bad place you can think of). I was HORRIFIED by the people at their MTU. HORRIFIED. More on that later.
I was promptly assigned a new case worker and guess what – she was amazing! The new lady is kind and smart and speaks good English (I can’t tell you what a difference this makes!). Within a day we’d gotten all the paperwork sorted and 5 days from the day I called her, I got an email from Dynavox saying Nathan had been approved for the trial!
Perseverance pays!