Much ado about Autism

Autism is neurological and genetic. It´s is a developmental disorder.

Sometime before birth little fault seems to occur in the brain. It´s a tricky fault because for the most part everything runs just fine and the baby that is born looks healthy and proper or so it seems. Elijah too looked healthy but he felt very different right from the start. "Don´t worry", the midwife and many other nurses and doctors would say during Elijahs first months after I repeatedly voiced my concerns to them, "he´ll be fine". But he wasn´t. He was diagnosed with Early Childhood Autism when he was 32 months old after a 13 months long odysee through doctors surgeries, hospitals and health centres. Elijah showed the classic signs of autism very early on. He was a really quiet baby, no trouble at all. No problems with feeding or sleeping. I carried him in a baby sling almost all day long. But he wasn´t interested in faces, he definitely prefered objects. He loved electronic sounds so much that he enjoyed this more than being talked to.He didn´t search for eyes instead looked away when our eyes searched his. He didn´t produce the happy little gurgling sounds, didn´t imitate, didn´t smile. There was almost no social responsive behaviour at all. Elijah was not a social being. Later on he didn´t start to point at things or showed any signs of shared attention. Hell, he didn´t even show ID ( Intentionality detector ) that is to follow a moving object with his eyes. But no one especially not the health visitor ( like a nurse ) or the doctors I took him to took any of that seriously. Uta Frith writes that the end of the second year of life the tiny neurological fault becomes more visible with sometimes horrendous results. Elijah was 19 months old when he lost all the abilities he had by then. He lost the little eye contact that was there, he stopped playing, couldn´t feed himself anymore, lost what littel speech was there, gestures and mimic went to zero and he sat in the corner with his back to us spinning spoons, red spoons. I knew it was autism and I said it oud loud but no one wanted to hear it. We lost valuable time taking him to the ear doctor because they believed he was deaf. We knew he wasn´t becuase he reacted to special words like "whale" and "aua". Words he liked. But he was being fitted with hearing aids, a torture for any hearing person let alone an autistic child. After fighting for nearly 6 months to have a BERA (Brainstem Evoked Response Audiometry) we were told our deaf child had 98% hearing capacity. We were on the road again, searching for someone to have the guts to diagnose autism so that we could get Elijah the help he so desperately needed. We didn´t know that a diagnosis did not mean he would get that help. We did not know that we had to fight for it every bit of the way. We did not know that for most of that way we would be on our own. We did not know how apallingly disabled people are treated in this country. But we were about to find out.

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