This Post Might Make You Lose Your Cookies: Autism and Getting Sick

"UUUhhhhhhhh! Mamamaaaaa! I'm gonna throw up!" our younger son said to me yesterday between fits of gagging. He was sick.

"Honey," I said to him calmly, "you already are throwing up.  Getting more anxious will just make you feel worse. Let it go."

We were in the family room of our home with our heads hanging over a trash can, and this child was on the cusp of an anxiety attack.  Parents hate when their children are sick, it's true. Me? I absolutely dread it when our kids are sick, not just because of their general discomfort but also for the added discomfort that comes along with the sensory dysfunction and communication gaps courtesy of autism.

Little Brother has sensory aversions to the textures of things that he puts in his mouth. He won't eat mashed potatoes. He's the only child I know that won't eat macaroni and cheese. Forget about spaghetti and don't you even think about putting sauce on his pizza.

Oh, and, by the way, vomit makes him vomit.

"But what if I puke and the puke makes me puke moo-oore?" he whined to me. "I can't. I just can't handle it."

"Just breathe, Honey," I told him.  "There is only so much puke a stomach can hold."

I personally do not understand these kinds of anxiety attacks. I do not worry to this degree; however, what I do know is the manner in which a thought can strike pure fear in our child, take hold of him and render him crippled in a shockingly short amount of time.  While he hovered above the trash can, my goal was to talk him down from that proverbial ledge.  The last thing we needed was for him to be puking and freaking out. The potential of that situation was downright ghastly.

 I started to have flashbacks to just two weeks prior to when he had a respiratory virus, the only other time this season that he was sick.

"Ewww!" he said with dread. "You aren't going to give me that colored medicine, are you? I hate that medicine. I don't like it. I don't want to take it. I don't."

Unfortunately, that time, I wasn't as quick to understand him as I was yesterday.

"Tough," I told him. "You need it. You're taking it. End of discussion."

"Uhhhhh," he whined.

I hated that. I just hated that. It made me go into drill sergeant mode. No kid of mine was going to wear his pants up and into his armpits whining about the taste of a cap full of medicine.

"Open your mouth and knock it back!" I told him.

He's such a good kid. Really. He really is. He's a people pleaser, which tends to increase his anxiety all the more because he doesn't want to make his true feelings known for fear that he will upset someone. So, as he was ordered, he "knocked it back". And, in a matter of a minute, he promptly barfed it all over his shirt.

I guess I should also mention that our younger son has sensory aversions to strong tastes, and, for the most part, by "strong" I mean anything other than bland. If he food has even a speckle or two of black pepper in it, he has to grab a large glass of water to drink, and he will force it down, fanning his mouth as though he had swallowed a mouthful of Habaneros.

When he vomited that medicine back upon himself, my instinct was shock and frustration. I shouted his name. I asked why he did that. I took off his shirt and directed him to the bathroom where he could promptly clean himself. And, while he was there, I had a moment to reflect, and I realized, geez, it isn't as thought the child wanted to vomit. He had a genuine problem, and the one person who is supposed to be there for him the most just criticized him.

Why did I lose my patience?

When he returned, I apologized to him, explaining that I didn't think about his sensory needs. "But, you kind of yelled," he said. "You acted frustrated and asked why I did that." He looked embarrassed. I felt horrible. No matter how many times I understand it and say it, the fact still remains that my brain is not autistic. I do not instinctively think the way that an autist would.

The challenge for me was to reduce my response time between reacting with my own instincts and adjusting those instincts to allow for what I understand about my children's needs.

"The problem was not yours," I told him. "The problem was mine. It was my fault that I didn't think about the fact that strong tastes truly bother you. I thought that you were being wimpy."

This felt good. It felt right. Yes. I was feeling enlightened. Yet, as I turned to find another form of medicine to ease our son's congested lungs, I saw him standing, just standing there, beside me with a look on his face as if he were in an unfamiliar building with no idea of what direction to take.

He looked at me the way people looked at him.

Son of a gun! My thinking was as foreign to him as his was to me! As the idea washed over me, I just wanted to scoop up our child and hug him. I felt so sorry for the sea of uncertainty in which he must swim nearly all day long. No wonder he wanted to become lost in his legos. Legos are easy to figure out. People, well, that's a completely different story.

I didn't hug him. He doesn't much like that. But I did explain to him that I did not have autism. I did explain to him that my brain does not think like his and that I do not have the sensory aversions that he has. He needed to learn not only how his brain worked but how my brain worked also, because, ultimately, this would be the only way he would learn to navigate society as a grown man.

Sometimes I look at these kids and think, goodness, they have a lot to learn still. Then, I think, goodness, I'm the one who has to teach them! Sigh. It's a steep, daunting learning curve.

"So, Mama?" he asked me later after we'd gone back to our normal routine. He was settled on his sick bed watching television. "Since you don't have the sensory problems that I do, does that mean that the feeling of barf doesn't make you barf?"

"Oh, no!" I said. "I totally agree with you on that one, Buddy. Barf is completely barfy."

*********************

The Lesson I Learned From My Freezer

There they sat in the freezer, directly in plain view, carelessly stacked on top of popsicle boxes and bags of frozen vegetables.  They were works of art and scientific studies at the same time.

They were, all five of them, created by our then-8-year-old son.

There was nothing convenient about the placement of the cups that held his treasures.  Dangerously tipped to one side or the other, they threatened to fall with even the slightest movement from any one of the other items on those shelves.  I was unable to get to anything without risking the entire effort.

And so, in the middle of my day, with an impossibly long list of things to do, these ill-placed experiments stopped me along my path, forcing me to live in the moment.

I blinked and looked at the cups.

Filled to varying degrees with orange juice, water, and milk, some thickened with different kinds of flavored syrup, they were each so carefully constructed. I peeked over the edge of them all and found that just beneath the thin layer of ice on their surfaces was an array of marbles, Legos, chocolate chips and fruit--things so different in size, scale and density that they provided absolutely perfect

conditions with which to conduct a study regarding the freezing point of different matter.

I took a step back, looked to the counter that stood across from the items in the freezer and smiled. There, ready for duty, sat a digital timer and a hand made log which our Little Scientist planned to use in order to collect his findings.

Which cup's contents would freeze faster and why?

I turned again to gaze at the cups in the freezer and realized that they did have one thing in common.

Planted in the center of each experiment was one of his favorite Lego men, his special toys, their presence putting into perspective for me the entire scene.

This was his play.

He was a kid just being a kid...the only way that he knew how. This is what his brain naturally liked to do when left to its own devices. In many ways, he was so far ahead of his peers. In other ways, he struggled more than his outward appearance showed.


He was the child who, at four years old, told me that my dangling, wet strands of hair looked like cirrus stratus clouds.

He was our expert on natural disasters by the age of five.

He was someone who could tell you everything there was to know about the mating habits of leopard geckos.

He was the boy who said this week that his jar of slime looked like ectoplasm.


 At his age, I'm pretty sure that I compared my jar of slime to snot.

This child was a child unlike any I had ever known. Yet, as with many children diagnosed with developmental delays and disorders, much of his life until that point had been focused on what was going 'wrong' with him.

We needed to know this. I don't deny that.

However, why there exists some mental shift in those who approach children with needs--why the forefront becomes clouded by the problems and not the positives--I do not know.

I am guilty of it.

"Hey, Buddy," I called out to him. "This is some very impressive work here!"

"Yeah," he said as he casually shrugged his shoulders, "I just wondered what would happen to the liquid molecules if manipulated and then all put in the same temperature below freezing."

But, of course.

Wanting to talk to him about how brilliant I thought he was, I gingerly asked him, "If you were to explain to the world what autism was, what would you say?"

"Autism is like a remote control for the brain," he responded thoughtfully. "It disables a lot of things--like scissors cutting a wire." I found it interesting that his definition of autism explained how it prevented people from doing things.

Both practically and clinically speaking, yes, we also needed to know this. However, as impressive as I found his answer to be, I also wished that his life had shown him more of the positive things that can accompany autism.

"Very true," I told him in affirmation of his words. I knew that he was thinking of his older brother who was low-verbal had faced many challenges due to his autism. "And, did you know that autism can also enable you to some really cool stuff?"

He shook his head.

"The way that you can learn every single fact about any topic that interests you?" I suggested. "That is likely a trait of your autism.  Heck, let's also remember that you know everything about the Japanese railway system. What kid knows that?!"

 He smiled.

"And, the way that you can look at something,take a mental image of it and store that exact image in your brain as it was the first time you saw it?" I shot him a look of complete admiration. "How about how you remember the day and the date of just about practically everything?!" I reminded him. "Very impressive, my friend. That, too, is all likely due to autism. It is your autism. This is how autism looks in you.  Pretty cool, huh?"

That day I realized that I had an obligation to our children to not only continue to shape the way that society viewed autism but to also shape the way that the boys viewed themselves.  I guessed that, because life often seemed to be thrown to me at warp speed, I wasn't so great at taking a step back and planning a more deliberate attack.

It often seems that I am flying by the  seat of my pants.

I do not have autism, and I do not have to function in society with that label attached to me for the rest of my life. However, our boys do.  What mother would want to send her children into the world feeling that a label had made them any less important than any one else?

I leaned down and planted a kiss on our Little Scientist's head.

"Wow," he said to me. "I didn't know all of that. I wonder if anyone wishes that they had my kind of autism?"


Right there. Right then, in that very moment and in our little world, everything with this child seemed at peace.


******************************

This entry was written and submitted LATE in response to last week's writing prompt from the Group Blogging Experience 2 (GBE2): "In My Freezer".  Let's hope I don't earn detention for my late submission.