Me and my occupational therapist

Sandy Martin and Sarah Foster

Two-and-a-half-year old Sandy Martin would be lost without his ‘support crew’ of physical therapist from St Mary’s Hospital paediatric and child development teams. Here, his mum Fiona describes the difference regular sessions with his occupational therapist, Sarah Foster, makes to the quality of comfort and enjoyment in his everyday living.

“Since Sandy was born in August 2008, we have been driving aboard a not-always-so-magical mystery bus, travelling further and further across new (and often barely chartered lands) in an attempt to find the cause of his ongoing low muscle tone and global developmental delay. Endless tests, endless waiting for results, endless verdicts of ‘pleasingly normal’ (as his paediatrician Dr Mando Watson so cheerfully describes them) – which, of course, is much to our great relief, but still, as many families in similar positions of undiagnosis know all too well, the waiting game can also prove frustrating, dispiriting and, at times, extremely heartbreaking. At once, the great unknown bears a continued promise of hope and yet also an unsettling anxiety of despair in not knowing how to do more to help make things better.

Enter our guardian angels – the team of St Mary’s Hospital and Westminster PCT doctors, therapists and support staff who have helped guide us through the day-to-day needs of a little one with developmental difficulties. Very early on, when Sandy first came under child development’s care when he was eight months old, one therapist in particular, occupation therapist Sarah Foster, embraced Sandy’s challenges with great thoughtfulness and sensitivity, taking it upon herself to help co-ordinate his team to ensure they were providing him with the best interactive multi-disciplinary care. Sandy had little energy, very low weight gain and an overall lack of responsiveness to us and his environment.

With Sarah’s focus on supporting the development of Sandy’s ability to play (getting him to hold a toy at the very beginning, whilst he lay on his side, was no mean feat), improving his fine motor and self-help skills (he ran out of energy so fast that even sitting, nestled into someone’s lap, to look at a book was difficult), and encouraging his sensory development (her gift to Sandy of a rainbow-coloured slinky was a major turning point in his interest in the outside world), her input into his daily routine has been fundamental. Without her, it is unlikely that today Sandy would now be sitting up with the rest of the family at the dinner table at mealtimes (and learning to feed himself), banging batons on his funky xylophone or investigating the machinations of a toy fire truck with both hands whilst sitting beautifully upright on the floor, and most importantly, he would have never discovered his passion for bubbles! Sandy will do almost anything if you promise to blow him some bubbles.