well, I was born at 28 weeks. “Extremely premature babies (born at 28 weeks or less) have an increased risk of developmental problems.”
I was super lucky; they’d JUST put in place a brand new neonatal center one town away from where I was born. It was so new they were still painting the walls – it was only up for 3 months when I was born, and it was state of the art for the early 1970s. [so it wasn’t common place until other hospital’s old equipment wore out – probably not ’til years later).
So I got the same quality of care a 28 weeks old born a few years later got. Fortuitous timing.
Had access to a cerebral palsy center for physical therapy between 2-4 years old; I didn’t know those places were rare. So, no sign of any of that; physical therapy rewires brains.
So yeah, no complaints on that. Glad to be here. But yeah, left impacts for sure. Sudden early birth at “very low birth weight” (VLBW) = blossoming of neural clusters; “old brain” – that’s there’s sometimes precociousness – at the expensive of fewer cross-brain connections (generalizing – social awareness connections) etc.
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blind in one eye, deaf in one ear; poor hearing + vision in the good ones – and they ain’t even on the SAME side.. so I have to lean diagonally and chose if I wanna see something better or hear it better lol
I’d say poor hearing is probably one of the harder ones socially; too many people talking at once means mental overload; probably deafness mimics symptoms of some of the anxiety things; straining to hear + too much input = sensory overload, etc.
So, I like typing to people. Got good at it.
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