PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Sometimes, small steps forward are not with feet. In Hunter's case, they're done with his fingers.
"We're trying to get him to use both of his hands together, trying to get him to work on the grip strength," said Joe Schuster, occupational therapist.
"Hunter will tell people he has muscle problems, you know?" said Lorena Benson, Hunter's mother.
Muscle problems his mother didn't know about until it was brought to her attention at Speech Therapy at the new John P. Moses Esq Pediatric Rehab Center.
"He has Duchenne muscular dystrophy. And so, originally, we started coming for the speech, having no idea about the muscular dystrophy, and then when he had his PT eval with Janine, she kind of picked up on the muscular dystrophy, so she, you know, kind of made calls to the doctor and stuff like that, and that's where we ended up," added Benson.
For the past nine years, Hunter has been coming here weekly to play games with a purpose.
"Keep him as strong as possible, keep as much movement as possible because it's important that he keeps these things as long as he can," said Schuster. "The idea is to keep them as strong as possible for as long as possible."
Even though Hunter's condition is degenerative, his mother says it's his playtime at Allied Services that helped him stay in the fight.
"I don't know that we'd be talking. I don't know that we'd be moving around so well, you know?" added Benson, "If it wasn't for Janine kind of figuring out what was going on, that really made a big difference. So I think we definitely would have been in a different place without Allied."
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