My brain hurts...

this is a previous post from March 03, 2010 off of a different blog...more about this on the next March 4 post

with all the information I am processing…all the thoughts I am having. All the things I am seeing, watching for or worrying about. Literally my head is hurting. Not like a headache but like it is over worked.

Brady is not talking. I am worried. I stumbled upon a blog of another mama about two weeks ago. It scared me. scared the hell outta me. Her sweet son was diagnosed with PDD-NOS, pervasive development disorder-not otherwise specified. It is on the autistic spectrum. autistic spectrum. her description of her son was what scared me.

he sounded a lot like Brady. When I picture autism, for the most part, I picture the hand flapping. the walking on toes. I assume no eye contact at all. I know now from just a little bit of reading that these things are obviously signs but there are many more. many more that are not as glaring. perhaps not as obvious if you will.

about 2-3 months ago I commented to Brad that I was worried about Brady was autistic or that he had traits that I found concerning. this was as we were sitting down to dinner and I was walking him through his meal time “routine”. he has to push the pause button on the remote, whether the tv is on or not, and then has to turn the lights on. he grunts, fusses and cries until he gets to perform these things. this is a routine at every meal. we just laughed that perhaps he was OCD instead and then went on our way.

After reading this blog two weeks ago I called Early Intervention in our area. I called because I panicked. Primarily my concern is that Brady does not talk. at all. he maybe says 5-7 words. Actually after filling out this sheet for the speech therapist I figured out that it is 12-14 words. but there are 2-3 signs in there and a couple that only we would be able to understand. he is unable to pronounce consonants. he drops the last half of Mommy and Daddy. His speech issues are, to me, severe for his age. typically at 2 a child will have up to 50 words or more and putting them together in 2-3 word phrases. That stat alone tells us Brady is behind. very behind.

So…EI came out and evaluated him. his communication skills are those of a 16 month old. He was one week shy of 28 months when that test was done. almost a year behind in communication. holy shit. that made me so sad. so sad. He was behind in everything though and I think that is what got me. They evaluated on 5 different developmental areas and his range was 16-20 months. so even in physical and adaptive development he was 8 months behind. again…very hard to take in.

so we got the ball rolling. There are many other concerns I have. he has other behaviors that concern me but for now I am trying to file them away and will share them with the EI people. I gave our case worker a big long list when she was here last week.

this week on Friday, almost here thank goodness!, we will meet with a speech language pathologist, SLP, and our case worker again. I am even more scared to be honest to have him evaluated by a SLP because I worry that he may score even worse but I keep reminding myself that we are doing this to get him help. No matter how low he scores we are doing this so that hopefully he does not grunt for the rest of his life. we are doing this to help him out.
The case worker will also be bringing a “test” that can show some red flags for ASD, autism spectrum disorder. I am pretty sure that I am going to be requesting a professional eval, ADOS, for Brady too just to put our minds at ease but I am curious to hear what they have to say on Fri.

Bottom line for us is that regardless of what all this comes to show we love Brady and will do whatever we need to help him. it is just a scary path to walk down right now not knowing where it will lead. but we have been down scary paths with Josey and come out on the other side ok so I think we will be ok this time too…but my heart and brain are still a little sore.