Tag Archives: regression

In Hope, Acknowledging the Despair

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Remember last week’s post so long it required subheadings? Remember the subheading “Whence My Anxiety?” and how I described the City Kids Club rejecting two-year-old Martin? Remember yesterday’s post, which was a follow-up to the post so long it required subheadings? Okay. This is another follow-up to the post so long it required subheadings, and specifically a follow-up to the “Whence My Anxiety?” section.

Done with introduction/explanation. Thanks for your patience.

It was summer 2010, around Martin’s second birthday, when Adrian and I realized something was “off” with Martin. If you read this blog, you probably don’t need details about autism’s warning signs: lack of attention, inability to follow simple directions, nighttime wakefulness, daytime exhaustion. In September 2010, an old friend of mine, an Early Intervention provider, traveled from my hometown to the City and helped us complete an M-CHAT (modified checklist for autism in toddlers) questionnaire, which she evaluated. (As it turned out, my friend didn’t really need the M-CHAT. After ten minutes just interacting with Martin, she knew that he almost certainly had autism.) By October 2010, we had begun the process of formal diagnosis and enrollment in EI.

I remember autumn 2010 as a time of Martin not really regressing, but slipping. The symptoms moved from “something off” to “obvious.” He lost all eye contact. He no longer responded to his name. His communication skills stopped developing. He drifted the perimeter of our apartment, dragging his fingertips along the wall as he hummed to himself. What we’d once called Martin’s “happy dance”—running circles around our open staircase when Samara arrived—became instead a self-stimulatory ritual beyond his control, ever more circles, ever longer, until finally he’d collapse into a lethargic slump and spend the next hour on the floor, pushing a toy back and forth.

We began changing Martin’s diet in January 2011, and started biomedical interventions in February. The initial progress was so swift that I thought we’d be done with autism within a year or two. Within months, Martin was sleeping through the night, and we the first seeds of functional, i.e., non-echolalic, language were sprouting.

For September 2011, seven months after we started biomed, we were able to secure a spot in one of the City’s preeminent special-needs preschools. Stop your giggling. It’s New York City. We compete for special-needs preschool placements, of which the City has far too few. Martin was placed into a bilingual (Spanish/English), 12-1-1 (12 students, one teacher, one assistant teacher) classroom. It was a stretch, we knew. The instructors from Martin’s EI center said he needed a smaller student-teacher ratio than 12-1-1. Adrian and I figured, however, that Martin was getting better, and that soon he would be able to function in the 12-student class, and that in any event, the only spots still available in preschool were in the bilingual, 12-1-1 setting. So we took the spot, with gratitude.

From the beginning, Martin’s classroom teacher reported problems. The other kids could follow one-step directions, at least, and already were learning to cut with safety scissors. Martin followed no directions and melted down when it was time to transition activities. The other kids were fully toilet-trained, or well underway toward that goal. The other kids could watch short films. The other kids could walk to the classroom by themselves. Martin—Martin was himself. Very soon we began to hear murmurs that Martin might need to change classes.

The hammer fell a few months later. Adrian and I were called to a meeting with the teacher and administrators. Martin could not handle a 12-1-1 classroom. Fortunately, the school now had a spot available in an English-language, 8-1-2 classroom (eight students, one teacher, two assistant teachers). Martin would be moved slowly, spending short periods of time in the new classroom, and then half days in the new classroom, and finally saying goodbye to his 12-1-1 friends.

Martin’s removal from the 12-1-1 classroom ranks second in the painful moments I’ve experienced on this journey, behind his rejection from the City Kids Club. To be sure, the 12-1-1-to-8-1-2 classroom move is a distant second. The preschool wasn’t kicking Martin out; they were thoughtfully placing him in a setting to meet his then-current needs. And I was more prepared. I’d had weeks to internalize this possibility, and didn’t even need to reach for the tissue box someone had put on the table at our meeting. Still, the decision forced me to acknowledge that Martin’s recovery was not going to happen as fast as I’d thought, and that after the rapid initial progress, his improvement had slowed. His needs were still great, more extensive even than the needs of most preschoolers in special education.

Also on the Top 10 Most Painful Moments List? Touring private special-education elementary schools, trying to find an appropriate kindergarten placement for Martin, and hearing repeatedly that while dyslexia, learning disabilities, dyspraxia, &c. were acceptable, children with “autism and other global delays” should not bother to apply. Let’s not go there, this post.

I was already blogging when Martin changed preschool classes. I didn’t write about the event, at the time, because it was too painful. Later, when autism’s grip had loosened a bit more and I was feeling better, I decided to write about it. I meant to write about it. But I didn’t. For whatever reason, I still couldn’t get there.

So what’s going on now? Why am I dragging these dark moments onto the internet for all to read?

It’s because of hope. Martin right now is living a bold season for recovery. Language, good. Sleep, good. Health, good. Attention, improving. Socialization, improving. Physical skills, improving. I am surfing an wave of hope. Full recovery seems more possible than it has in years. More possible, maybe, than since the 12-1-1-to-8-1-2 switch.

I might regret reviving, here on the blog, our journey’s lowest points. Wind, you can have my caution. I’m overjoyed for the confidence to share.

Regression, Progress, and What Does It Matter?

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When Martin was diagnosed, during the time when Adrian and I were learning what autism means, Adrian asked whether I’d ever seen Martin “go backwards,” i.e., lose skills or developments that he once had.

No, I told him. No, I hadn’t seen that. There wasn’t anything that Martin had been able to do and no longer could.

He’d once made eye contact, once been interactive. I didn’t think about that. The changes were so gradual.

That’s good, Adrian replied. He’d read that going backwards was somehow worse than not having progressed in the first instance.

Oh? Well, phew. I haven’t seen Martin go backwards. I guess, on that point, we’re lucky.

Four-and-a-half years change a lot. Today I have a more informed opinion on regressive versus classic (non-regressive) autism. The idea that classic autism is somehow less threatening, wherever Adrian got that idea, must be mainstream. It must come from the school of thought that says autism is untreatable, recovery is not possible, and the best you can do is to teach a child with autism to live with his disorder, and to hope the condition doesn’t become more severe.

A few words about terminology. Regressive autism seems to appear following some insult to the immune system, like a serious illness, a vaccination, or an allergic reaction. In such cases, I believe—and I can’t say often enough that I am a non-scientifically minded lay person treading water in an ocean of evolving knowledge—the child likely has some preexisting immune shortcomings, or a genetic predisposition to these shortcomings, and whatever injury occurs throws the child’s whole system into disarray.

Classic, non-regressive autism is more of a mystery. The classically autistic child, as I generally consider Martin to be, does not acquire skills and them lose them; he simply never meets expected developmental milestones, or at some point stops meeting them. In Martin’s earliest months, we thought he was physiologically advanced. “You should video that,” his first pediatrician said, when I showed her that Martin already could turn over, front-to-back, at 17 days old. “Otherwise no one will believe you.” We marveled at Martin’s extensive vocabulary and his uncanny memory. “That is incredible,” the same pediatrician said at Martin’s 24-month check-up, when she realized that he’d memorized all the characters from the 1995 BBC version of Pride & Prejudice and was repeating their lines (hello, echolalia). But the thousands of words never came together into original sentences. The walking, a bit late at 14 months, never became running or skipping. The interest in videos gave way to obsession with wheels and mechanical parts. Martin stopped meeting expectations.

As it turns out, from everything I understand, and from all the families I’ve met who are on journeys like ours, regressive autism is more readily treatable than classic autism. Take that with a grain of salt, of course; I don’t know any form of autism that is really “readily” treatable, and certainly none that is easily treatable. Still, there appears, at least anecdotally, to be a distinction: Regressed kids, when treated biomedically, recover better.

True confession, and one I’ve made before, on this blog: Sometimes I feel disheartened when I see another family making more rapid progress healing their child than I’m making. What am I missing? I ask. What are they doing that I’m not? Then, where possible, I comfort myself by thinking, well, that boy’s autism was regressive. He was typically developing until age two-and-a-half. That’s why he’s recovering faster than Martin. These thoughts help. A little.

One school of thought holds that all autism is regressive, and the differences arise only based on when the regression occurred. For example, a pregnant mother’s (concurrent or earlier) exposure to certain pollutants or contaminants may crash her fetus’s developing system. In Martin’s case, I believe that the circumstances surrounding his birth—I was pressured to induce labor with Pitocin, leading to an un-planned Caesarian section, and then (healthy) Martin was taken to the NICU against my wishes and pumped with intravenous antibiotics—contributed heavily to the health and neurological problems that later became evidence. The injury, whatever it is, need not result from a lone tipping point, either. Many families report a series of mini-regressions following vaccinations and acetaminophen use.

If all autism is, to whatever extent, regressive, what does it mean that obviously regressive autism, cases in which a family watches language or eye contact or socialization fade rapidly, seems more readily treatable? Does it mean just that it is easier to recover skills if the child had them once? The ability to ride a bicycle or operate a manual automotive transmission, according to conventional wisdom, never disappears once acquired. Research shows that autism does not cause permanent brain injury, and that the brain can return to healthy functioning once the neural misfires and inflammation are eliminated. Perhaps a child who once spoke well can return to full language function faster than a child who never acquired spoken words. Playing catch-up for time lost is easier than starting from scratch.

Maybe all autism is regressive. Maybe there really is a difference between regressive and classic autism. Maybe regressive autism is more readily treatable. Maybe the important factor is the date of immune injury. Maybe the important factor is the extent of genetic predisposition. Maybe this, maybe that. For scientists, these questions matter. For a parent, fuhgeddaboudit. What does it matter, anyway? Keep chipping away at this monster, this autism, however long it takes.

Let’s Talk Honestly About Really Crappy Days

Posted on by findingmykid
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Most email traffic that passes through FindingMyKid@yahoo.com congratulates the progress we’ve made with Martin. Some correspondents compliment me (thanks!) for presenting the difficult aspects of recovery, too, instead of pretending every moment is roses and wine. A few parents bemoan their own children’s lack of progress.

I want to speak to the parents who feel like they aren’t making progress. To be honest, despite the progress we’ve made, wine and roses are far, far, far from our everyday reality.  That’s not to say that recovery isn’t the series of joyous breakthroughs I present in this blog. It is rather to admit that these developments punctuate long stretches of “no change” or even apparent regression, which I prefer to call “the reappearance of former symptoms.”

My last couple posts referred to the bad week Martin’s been having. Let’s add some more depth and talk about yesterday morning—

I knew the morning would be tough, because Martin took almost two hours to fall asleep the night before and was bound to be tired. At 5:55 a.m., as usual, I carried Martin from his room to our bed, to wake up with Adrian.

Around 6:35 a.m., as I was putting the final touches on breakfast, I heard yelling, whining, and a scream or two, all from Martin. I found Adrian trying to get Martin dressed. Martin was in a fetal position, refusing to cooperate. He said, “No! I want to stay here today! I don’t want to go to school.” Then, frustrated, he switched to the nonsensical: “I don’t want you! I’m going to sleep at school! I don’t want to come home!”

Adrian waved off my offer to assist. I returned to the kitchen. Ten minutes later, the crying and complaining uninterrupted, Adrian and Martin appeared in the kitchen. Martin was dressed, save for the “crazy socks” he was supposed to wear for Dr. Seuss appreciation week at school. His whine had become, “I don’t want to wear crazy socks. No! No! No! I don’t want breakfast.”

We got him seated at the table. Although he has a chair with footrest that facilitates using his legs and core to sit up straight, Martin slouched. When he saw his breakfast (turkey bacon and vegetables, pretty standard), he lowered his voice to the continuous, slurred word-melding that I detest. “No food oh Mommy oh Mommy oh Mommy Mommy Mommy no no no.” He thrust his fists into his stomach and curved his back, a posture that (I think) indicates stomach pain. When I tried to offer him turkey bacon, he batted my hand and screamed, “Noooooo!” He grabbed his glass of “kombucha with seeds,” pursed his lips on the stainless-steel straw, and changed his whine to, “Drink, only drink no anything else oh Mommy.”

Adrian passed back through the kitchen, kissed us both, wished me good luck, and left for work.

I switched on the kitchen television. Sesame Street. Martin’s a bit beyond that now. Still, I thought the distraction might help. Over the next half hour I managed to get his supplements and most of the bacon (none of the vegetables) into his mouth. In the meantime, he left his chair to bounce up and down, slapped at me, used his fingernail to scratch marks in the wooden tabletop, whined incessantly, dumped fish oil on his school sweater, told me to turn off Sesame Street, cried when I turned off Sesame Street, spilled his drink while refusing to take his mouth off the straw, curled himself into a ball around his Curious George sock puppet and wouldn’t release, threw vitamins on the floor, and ultimately dissolved into a tantrum because he had no time to play before the school bus came.

By sheer force of love, willpower, and coffee, I kept my patience and got him on the bus. (“Martin’s not feeling his best this morning,” I told the matron when I handed him over.) Then I returned to the kitchen to sulk.

That’s right, I sulked. Because when you are working hard to recover your child, a bad morning (bad day, bad week, bad month, bad season) leaves you wallowing in a stew of doubts.

•            What am I doing to my child? Is this worth it? What caused this meltdown? I think the culprit yesterday morning was probably the nystatin we started last week. I think. But really, who the heck knows? And why would it matter? If something—anything—I’ve done has caused Martin to feel like he did yesterday, am I really acting in his best interest?

•            Why have I given up so much to follow to pursue autism recovery? I used to have a career, disposable income, and free time. Now my job is “autism recovery specialist,” our money goes to therapies and supplements, and getting out for an evening requires hours of preparation. Even worse, I’ve met families who claim their children have improved markedly with nothing but traditional therapies like ABA and speech therapy. Why go on?

•            By working toward recovery, by rejecting the idea that Martin is bound to autism for life, am I making each day harder, for all of us? Long ago I wrote a post titled “Failure to Grieve.” To this day, I wonder whether Adrian and I would breathe easier if we just decided, Martin has autism. Let’s help him live with it as best he can.

•            Other than families in the recovery community, almost everyone I know is a subtle naysayer. I never realized exactly how many ways there are to express skepticism: “Is Martin’s doctor a real M.D.?” “Do you have a regular pediatrician supervising all this, too?” “Is that actually a scientifically accepted principle?” “You’re not going to start saying kids shouldn’t get vaccinated, are you?” “Where did you hear about that?” “Have you tried taking all those supplements yourself?” “Poor Martin! What a shame that he can’t eat like other kids.” And those are comments from people who say they support what we are undertaking. When Martin is doing nothing but spitting venom and whining nonsensically, I think, You know, I really do like fitting in with other people. I think I’ll get off the whacky autism recovery path and go back to the mainstream.

So I sulked. I finished my coffee, and I climbed back in bed for an hour.

Then I rose again, made myself a protein shake, and went to CrossFit. Nothing clears my head quite like loud music and exercising to exhaustion. The truth is that mornings like yesterday are so remarkable only because Martin is getting better. With perspective, I remember the early days when we never knew what Martin was going to do next, and he lacked the language to convey his needs. He used to bolt if I wasn’t holding his hand. He used to cry inconsolably if he wanted to take the 2 subway but the 3 came instead. With perspective, I also reckon that, no matter what the ABA-enthusiasts say, no magic autism faerie is ever going to wave her wand and make Martin better without medical intervention. Recovering Martin’s health and opening him up to full participation in our world of opportunity—that’s up to me. It’s going to happen through my perseverance, or it’s not going to happen at all.

Back to wine and roses: To be even more honest, and less metaphorical, the recovery process has increased my dinnertime wine consumption, Adrian is a thoughtful husband who sends me flowers, and indeed most weeks I buy roses or tulips for our kitchen table vase. The path to recovery is hard. Wine and roses may not be everything, but they sure do help get past the stumbles.

For better or for worse, he's my guy.

For better or for worse, he’s my guy.

Frustration Posting

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Months ago, when Martin was having more trouble sleeping—if you’ve been reading for a while, you may remember this—I would sometimes draft posts during those long midnight hours, sitting in his room with an iPad. To myself, I called it “exhaustion posting,” and I knew it wasn’t a good idea. When it’s 3:00 a.m. and I’ve slept eight hours during the past 72, it doesn’t matter how much progress we’ve made overall or how bright the future looks. I will have nothing nice to say.

I’m about to do something else that the reasonable part of my brain (the part that gets overshadowed, often) knows is not a good idea. Let’s call it “frustration posting.”

Why am I frustration posting when I know I shouldn’t?

Because I’m frustrated.

We’re in the dumps again. Crapsville. The Land of No Focus. The State of Bad Digestion. Obsession City.

Autism territory.

When Adrian and I returned from vacation last week, Martin’s symptoms were, I thought, more pronounced than when we’d left. I concocted several explanations—change in routine without school, anguish at wondering if his parents would return, a stale supplementation routine—that allowed for easy solutions.

We’ve been home now six days. So far, the easy solutions have failed. (I’ll admit that I have not yet updated the supplementation. I have a call scheduled for Thursday to discuss that with Martin’s excellent Track Two doctor.) Martin’s belly is distended. He has diarrhea. He’s scratching. And the behavioral symptoms have become yet more pronounced.

Getting Martin fed and ready for school this morning was like weaving a basket from cooked spaghetti. Nothing worked. He lacked the attention to put food in his mouth, absent constant nagging. He had no language to express what he sought and reverted instead to “You wan’ you wan’ you wan, I wan’ I wan’,” without object or variation. He refused to stand long enough to get his pants down for the toilet, or to don a jacket for the New York winter; when I tried to accomplish those tasks, he threw himself against me or fell to the floor. Adrian, who takes Martin down to meet the school bus, later reported that Martin had been unable to engage in even simple conversation like providing his teacher’s name.

This evening was worse. Evenings used to be the most difficult part of my day, because as Martin grew tired, he grew unmanageable, even less able to read my signals or control himself. I thought those days were over. Today he arrived at 5:30 p.m. with a babysitter, utterly hyperactive, laughing without obvious reason, jumping on the sofa, darting from chair to stair to table. At 6:15, when the babysitter prepared to leave, Martin began screaming because she zipped her vest. That’s a special new highlight, this fixation on zippers. Once the poor sitter managed to escape, from 6:15 until bedtime was a near-unmitigated scream-and-cry fest, punctuated only by bites of dinner and senseless verbal demands. “You wan’ bath. You wan’ not bath. No. No. No. You wan’ counter. Mommy is coming back. She’s coming back. You wan’ go outside. Outside.” Every chance he got, he grabbed my cardigan and yanked the zipper down or pushed it up until it caught my hair or the skin of my neck. He left his plate and ran around. He slunk from chair to floor and refused to rise.

When I finally got him into bed he tried to insist on wearing the tight winter vest over his pajamas.

I probably should have indulged him. Instead I refused. Scream-and-cry fests diminish my empathy. Insofar as scream-and-cry fests are symptoms of something amiss within Martin, they should cause the opposite, i.e., a flood of empathy. In the world of reason, that would happen. In the world of frustration, it does not.

So there you have it. The bad with the good.

Right now I’m telling myself that we turned the tide in late November and early December, and that we can do so again now.

Right now I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Right now I’m trying to breathe.