Before I can share where we are at now, I must first share where we have been. I guess the best place to start is the beginning.....or what I like to call "D-Day" (no that doesn't stand for what you might think it does). For us, "D-Day" is the day we received the diagnosis of Autism.
In the beginning, everything was "normal" (for lack of a better word)......our son had no issues at birth, and was developing at age level and above prior to his 2-year old immunizations. I'll go into the details at a later point in time, but the short version of things (for now).....we had to re-locate for hubby's job. Prior to the big move, I took our son to the pediatrician for his check-up and 2 year old shots. I arranged to have his records sent to what would be the new pediatrician (yes I did my research prior to the move and had already set up an appointment with the new doctor).
After the move, I took our son in to the new doctor's office for his "new patient" visit. While there, the doctor and I began to discuss his immunizations. Apparently his former pediatrician failed to transfer his ENTIRE file/chart to the new doctor, thus according to the records they had -- our son hadn't received his immunizations. While the doctor and I argued about it, the nurse took our son into the other room and administered the 2-year immunizations to him. So.....he received those shots TWICE -- exactly one month after he had already received them from his previous pediatrician.
Shortly afterwards the new doctor's office realized their "error" (their words, not mine -- IMHO I think it was more than just an "oops, we goofed up" type of error). Anyhow, the new doctor assured me that duplicate immunizations given a month apart wouldn't hurt our son. Well, IMHO he was WRONG!!! Within a 6 month time frame after those duplicate shots, our son began to regress. During those 6 months, I expressed my concerns to the doctor MANY times but was either ignored or treated like an "overly worried new mom". The doctor said "oh this is typical 2 year old behavior" and "oh don't worry, he's just jealous of the new baby, he'll grow out of it." In my heart I knew that something was seriously wrong.....so I gave up trying to convince that idiot doctor and contacted another pediatrician.
Now I'm sure some of you are wondering just how bad the regression was. I'm talking a serious regression in development......prior to the doctor's "error", our son was age level and above in ALL areas of development. Walking, talking, in the process of potty training, etc. All of that came to a screaching halt -- and things went backwards quickly. Over a 6 month time frame he lost his potty training, ALL verbal skills, and so much more. I felt absolutely helpless at that time, and as if I were watching our son slip away a little at a time. He became this wild-eyed, non-verbal little ball of energy.....sort of like that little boy in the "Jungle Book" story.
It took a lot of phone calls, referrals, etc but we were able to get him in to a place to be evaluated.....that is the day we refer to as "D-Day".....the day that our worst fears were confirmed after several hours of testing & evaluation. At that time our son was almost 3 years old, yet he had regressed to an 11 month old status in development. Yes, you read that correctly --- he regressed to an 11 MONTH OLD status in development!
We sat there feeling just numb & completely overwhelmed as the professional told us "your son has Autism"......talk about having your world cave in....feeling like someone just punched you in the gut as hard as they could, knocking the wind out of you......yep, that's what I felt like. I remember sitting there, in complete shock.....the tears streaming down my face and thinking to myself "what now?" At the time, I knew very little about Autism.....most of what I did know came from the movie "Rain Man", which IMHO isn't an accurate description of what Autism is really like (although it is a good movie). After the shock went away, I jumped into "mom mode" -- I had to learn all that I could about Autism and figure out how to help our son.
And so, the journey began.......
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