It has been relatively quiet at our house lately. Or, perhaps, my slight hearing loss has become total, and I am just unaware of the chaos around me. Since I can still here dishes being clanked in the kitchen, I'll assume it is calm for now.
Ian has settled into reading mode for the day. In fact, when he is not outside looking for bugs, he is inside reading a library book, a catalog, the comics, or a Calvin and Hobbes anthology. Occasionally, he plays computer games or builds a new Lego robot of some sort. He has become my sedate child, the contemplative one. When he is not engrossed in one of these quiet activities, he and Ainsley are teaching Bionicles how to climb the window blinds, which strangely requires every light in the house to be on.
How did we get here? I feel like I am on another planet or that something terrible is about to happen. Something thunderously loud, like an airplane crashing into the house. Has autism trained me to expect catastrophes? I guess the only thing that surprises me these days is when what everyone else considers to be normal occurs in my home.
I wish I could say there was a single magic bullet that brought us to this point; but I know that is not the case. For starters, Ian spends 7 hours a day, 5 days a week with an excellent educational team who constantly help him with his scholastic and social material. Then there is the psychologist who meets with him every week to work on the really difficult interpersonal stuff - understanding emotions and other people's intentions, appropriate behavior, and connecting with other people. He has not mastered any of this, but he is trying.
We may even have his medications close to being well-balanced. The psychiatrist put him on a drug that has been shown in studies to help with many of the social symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. I believe it is beginning to help a little. Although we have not seen a consistent improvement, I am hopeful that he will learn the skills necessary for successful social interaction so he can achieve the things he will one day want professionally and personally. It's all about making progress, even though it may be slow.
This drug may not be right for him. I won't know for a while longer. Fortunately, I have learned to trust my instincts. They are rarely wrong. My gut will tell me when it's time for a change. Hopefully, Ian will one day be able to tell me, too. For now, I am going to enjoy the peace, do a little more painting, and try not to think about the crash that may be in our future.
2 comments:
You may know already, but two years ago channel 11 did a stateline show twice, with gov and med officials, about a couple children cured of autism with very small doses of enzymes. The head of the ama autism board(a board 80 years old) said it was the first hopeful cure he's seen, and they were going to test it on 1200 autism cases in children nation wide. [withing 6 months, that stateline show disappeared, but a lot showed up on the internet about ENZYMES WORKING!]
Since autism has only been clearly defined by the medical establishment for a few decades (and Asperger Syndrome for less than 15 years), I question the credibility of this "head of the ama autism board" - how could the AMA have a board for something they did not recognize as a disease 80 years ago?
I don't know which enzymes to which this person is referring, but when I went to the internet, I found the following in Harvard Medical School's Consumer Health Information:
Autism Studies Show No Benefit From Enzyme Hailed As Cure
December 9, 1999
The Associated Press
An enzyme hailed as a possible cure for autistic children worked no better than a placebo in its first two rigorous studies, researchers reported today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"There seems to be a significant placebo effect, but no difference between secretin and placebo," said Dr. Adrian Sandler, lead author of the study.
The findings "strongly suggest that secretin should not be recommended to treat autism until the results of our other ongoing studies are known," said Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which sponsored that study.
I have to fall back to something a well-respected research scientest recently told me: "If [XYZ] could cure autism, all doctor's would be prescribing it."
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