I know I may grouse a bit but ultimately Matthew’s autism recovery has been remarkable. Just recently we have had two different people “in the know” marvel at how well Matthew is doing.
Autism Recovery 2012
The other day I had to take Matthew to the eye doctor. This particular eye doctor often works with children on the autism spectrum so she is no stranger to seeing kids with autism behaviors. As she interacted with Matthew, asking him questions and examining his eyes, you could tell she was surprised at how well he was doing. She asked me how we could even tell he has an ASD? I proceeded to tell her that what and who she was seeing at that moment was not the child we had always had. That we had done a lot to recover him. She said she was very impressed and would not have ever thought she was dealing with a child on the spectrum.
Of course that was only a small amount of time out of his typical day, and that makes it difficult to evaluate him. But he really has made great strides and typically does not look overly autistic.
The second incident happened before swimming this weekend. We take swim lessons at a school that specializes in teaching special needs kids so I often run into other ASD parents that I know while I am there. This particular weekend I ran into my friend Heidi. She has a son with autism so she is no stranger to what it looks like. As my middle son ran off to play with some of the toys, Matthew hung around and asked questions and just talked a bit. After some small chit chat, Heidi had to ask me if Matthew was my child with autism. She had that slightly puzzled look on her face that says “I know he is the kid, but he just can’t be.” I told her yes, it was Matthew. She just looked at me then said ” He doesn’t look like he has autism at all. What are you doing?” She was so impressed and so excited she had to take a few notes on her smart phone. She promised to call me later so we could talk in more depth about what we were doing to help Matthew so much. She felt her son had hit a plateau.
It was really wonderful to see him doing so well. And I have to say I felt pretty good to know that we weren’t the only ones seeing it. No, we haven’t lost the diagnosis yet, but I think we are really heading in the right direction. We will continue with our current protocol for a few more months, then if we aren’t seeing continued improvement we will be trying another, similar intervention. I am pretty excited by where we are headed. I’ll keep you all posted.