"Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming."A friend just told me that sentence recently. If you are a parent of a child under the age of 10 years old whether physical or at heart you remember Dory from the movie Nemo. But there are times when you can't. There are times in a person's life, when it's hard to do that. When you are drowning and there's nothing you can do to fix it?
Picture a woman that's in the water, her life raft as tipped over. In the distance she see's her refuge, but no matter how hard she swims the waves keep taking her further and further away from that refuge. Then when you add her "weights", her grown-up responsibilities(taking care of a house, family, job, or etc.) it becomes harder to keep swimming. Then if one of "weights" has an extra challenge because of their special needs it becomes even harder to swim and to not just let the waves carry her away.
There are times where she just sits and tread water because she's not sure of which direction to go (Does she continue to fight against the waves to get to her refuge? OR Does she just give up and )But the longer she treads water the harder these directions are to figure out. AND then right now with the season of life that she's going thru the waves are getting BIGGER and BIGGER to try to swim against. Right now she's been hit by some big ones, and she can't seem to find where the surface of the water is. It's getting harder and harder to try. She doesn't want to just give up and let her "air" disappear because by giving up she'd totally fail her children and her husband...but then again she's so tired of trying to reach the surface, that she just wants to stop...for awhile...what's the answer?
Just wish GOD would answer her prayers sometimes.
God Bless
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Asperger's
My mother has always thought that Dawn has Asperger's since she was a very small girl (about the age of 3), I never really listened to her about it. And then about 5 years ago, Dawn was diagnosed with ADHD with anxiety. I didn't put her on medication because she wasn't showing signs at school where it was interfering in things. Her teachers agreed that she didn't need meds. Well as time has gone on, she would do stuff that made me quietly think this isn't ADHD - I've never done this (I have ADHD) and I don't know anyone that does this either.This is something more. Mom would insist that the doctor got the diagnosis wrong and that it was Asperger's. I told her no, I asked the doctor who diagnosed Dawn if she was the spectrum. The doctor was very firm about that and said No she doesn't. So I believed her.
Well -Dawn has been struggling in school BIG time since then, she has always struggled with friends, social cues and the list goes on and on. I've been trying to get her to be placed on ADHD meds, thinking that the "wall" that ALL of us with ADHD struggle with had finally hit. Well now it was her doctors struggling and dragging their feet about placing her on it. Recently this past summer my uncle who I loved and respect agrees with my mom that Dawn has Asperger's. They told me to go to some website and read the definition about it. I compared it with what they had for a definition of ADHD. I was stunned. The definition of ADHD fit but not really. Then I went to the Asperger's one and I remember sitting there in the quiet of the night just being stunned, and quietly crying because reading it- was like they had been in my home her ENTIRE life. How could this had been missed?
So I did some more reading and researching, checked out some books and realized more and more that this is what we are probably looking at. So I called her peds. doctor - he told me that we needed to have a referral to the local ASD clinic or Autism Spectrum Disorder clinic. We were looking at a 12-18 month waiting list. So now we contacted two other clinics and we're on all three waiting lists. Her peds. doctor saw Dawn for something else recently and did a "loose" diagnosis....meaning it's a series of questions that they ask and etc. If it meets those qualifications then we go on to have the official diagnosis. He said that he's glad I didn't wait till he saw her and that I had placed her on the waiting lists, because he feels that she does have Asperger's. I have never felt so alone in my life!
Jessie doesn't want to accept that she has this, but he's quietly starting to agree too. Everything is starting to fall into place. There's a book that we are reading that answers parent's questions about Asperger's and it's like they wrote this book all about my Dawn!!! Again how come this was missed? I get mad because all the reading I do about ASD talks about early intervention making the difference and the older they get the harder it is for therapies and resources to make a difference for them. Have we missed this window?
So what do we do now? We still patiently wait for her name to come up on the waiting lists. We go through the minefields of emotions that she has. The daily rollar coasters of emotions can be sooo exhausting between her and Spencer's special needs is a lot. I've joined a support group online of parents that have children with ASD or children with Asperger's. They have been helping me alot not feel so alone, and to understand what's going on and what will be coming. And I just found out that normal teenage hormonal development becomes a HUGE rollar coaster for "Aspies". When they are having great days, they are really really great and when they are having rotten days, they are really rotten. GGGRRREEEAAATTT! Can we say already going through that? :-\
It explains soo much guys about our Dawn...including why she is soo OBSESSED about animals (mainly 1 or 2 in particular), why she has almost NO empathy (which we couldn't understand -because the middle two boys do), and the list goes on. Now on top of her dyslexia (which we also found out this summer about - again - why the hell wasn't this caught?) it's looking like she has Asperger's too.
oy vey!
GOD only gives you what you can handle with HIS help...but I truly wish he didn't trust me ( & Jessie ) so much.
GOD Bless ~
Well -Dawn has been struggling in school BIG time since then, she has always struggled with friends, social cues and the list goes on and on. I've been trying to get her to be placed on ADHD meds, thinking that the "wall" that ALL of us with ADHD struggle with had finally hit. Well now it was her doctors struggling and dragging their feet about placing her on it. Recently this past summer my uncle who I loved and respect agrees with my mom that Dawn has Asperger's. They told me to go to some website and read the definition about it. I compared it with what they had for a definition of ADHD. I was stunned. The definition of ADHD fit but not really. Then I went to the Asperger's one and I remember sitting there in the quiet of the night just being stunned, and quietly crying because reading it- was like they had been in my home her ENTIRE life. How could this had been missed?
So I did some more reading and researching, checked out some books and realized more and more that this is what we are probably looking at. So I called her peds. doctor - he told me that we needed to have a referral to the local ASD clinic or Autism Spectrum Disorder clinic. We were looking at a 12-18 month waiting list. So now we contacted two other clinics and we're on all three waiting lists. Her peds. doctor saw Dawn for something else recently and did a "loose" diagnosis....meaning it's a series of questions that they ask and etc. If it meets those qualifications then we go on to have the official diagnosis. He said that he's glad I didn't wait till he saw her and that I had placed her on the waiting lists, because he feels that she does have Asperger's. I have never felt so alone in my life!
Jessie doesn't want to accept that she has this, but he's quietly starting to agree too. Everything is starting to fall into place. There's a book that we are reading that answers parent's questions about Asperger's and it's like they wrote this book all about my Dawn!!! Again how come this was missed? I get mad because all the reading I do about ASD talks about early intervention making the difference and the older they get the harder it is for therapies and resources to make a difference for them. Have we missed this window?
So what do we do now? We still patiently wait for her name to come up on the waiting lists. We go through the minefields of emotions that she has. The daily rollar coasters of emotions can be sooo exhausting between her and Spencer's special needs is a lot. I've joined a support group online of parents that have children with ASD or children with Asperger's. They have been helping me alot not feel so alone, and to understand what's going on and what will be coming. And I just found out that normal teenage hormonal development becomes a HUGE rollar coaster for "Aspies". When they are having great days, they are really really great and when they are having rotten days, they are really rotten. GGGRRREEEAAATTT! Can we say already going through that? :-\
It explains soo much guys about our Dawn...including why she is soo OBSESSED about animals (mainly 1 or 2 in particular), why she has almost NO empathy (which we couldn't understand -because the middle two boys do), and the list goes on. Now on top of her dyslexia (which we also found out this summer about - again - why the hell wasn't this caught?) it's looking like she has Asperger's too.
oy vey!
GOD only gives you what you can handle with HIS help...but I truly wish he didn't trust me ( & Jessie ) so much.
GOD Bless ~
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