David's diagnosis

When David was two, he went for a well checkup. He still had not started talking and the pediatrician was concerned. The first suspect was David's hearing. I was not optimistic that the hearing check would reveal anything. David had receptive language. He just could not talk. The pediatrician had his hearing checked anyway and of course, it showed no issues.

Eventually, our pediatrician referred us to a pediatric neurologist. I was concerned about a lot of things that went way beyond his inability to talk so I wrote down all of the strange things David was doing.
Not talking though he could clearly respond to commands
Humming like a bhuddist monk
Playing continuously with his toy vacuum cleaner
Not engaging with other children
Not sleeping at night
Lack of eye contact
His bout of head banging
(He had sound sensitivity, but I didn't recognize it)

In the course of our discussion with the pediatric neurologist, I gave him the list that I wrote down. He asked if he could keep the list. It was an excellent discription of autism.

I am glad I had gone to the bathroom before meeting with the pediatric neurologist. I am not sure I could have held it. I objected. Autistic children are touch sensitive. David is not. Autistic children go nuts when there is a change. David is easy going and handles change well. David is cuddly. He could not be autistic. But the pediatric neurologist let me know that the symptoms are different from one autistic to another.

Well, there it was. We had a diagnosis. Although I make it sound like it was just two meetings with two doctors, it took a lot longer. Each time another appointment with no result. But now that we had a diagnosis I felt sick. I had no idea what David's being autistic would entail. The one instance I had seen said that David would grow up to be monstrous. But more than that, I kept looking for what I had done wrong. My wife and I did not do drugs. We did not hurt him. We did nothing that might cause David to be autistic. So what happened? Where did I go wrong? I had no answers and yet I felt there had to be something.

It was a long phase of baying at the moon for me. When my father died, I did not feel the sense of loss as acutely as I felt when I learned that David was autistic. It was the death of everything I wanted and expected for my son. I thought that getting comfortable with David's diagnosis would be like getting comfortable with a permanent case of the shingles. All that time, David was still David, the cuddly, sweet, lovable, easy-going little guy. Without ever saying a word, David transcended my sense of loss. David made it easy for me through what otherwise would have been a painful maturity lesson. I did not have a broken doll, I had a little boy who was worthy of my time and effort.

Is spanking ever okay?

David was very late weaning from the breast. There may be some who would argue that this is the reason he was high functioning. There are others who might argue that this is the reason he was autistic. Sigh. I would argue that David loved to cuddle and breast feeding made it even better. At night, David would come to our room to feed and fall asleep next to his mother. Breast milk is sweet. The repeated overnight effect of the milk was that there were visible cavities in his teeth. He had dental work done under anesthesia and when he woke up he had metal caps over his incisors.

One day we discovered what looked like mouse bites being taken out of the insulation on the cords of our electric blanket. My daughter, Lisa, reported that David was biting into the cord. I could not be sure that David would survive a bite into a live wire. Fortunately, the blankets had been off when David bit into them but if he bit into other cords or if he bit into these when the blanket was on it would be a death sentence. The metal caps would send 110 volts through the dental nerve straight to his brain. Even if he survived, who knows what would be left of him.

I took David up to my room and showed him the blankets electric cord that he had bitten. The electric blanket had both sides unplugged and left in place. If David was to continue biting electric cords, I wanted him to bite cords that I knew were unplugged. The cord had bare copper strands showing where the insulation had been bitten away by his teeth. I explained in short sentences, simple yet adamant language, "Don't bite. Not allowed. Don't touch." In a flash of recalcitrance, David stuck the blanket's electric cord into his mouth. Just as fast as I could move, I had David over my knee and spanked him hard enough that it hurt even through the diaper. Just as fast I picked him back up and brought his face three inches from mine.

"Never again!" I growled. David was shocked. I had never done this before and I watched him break down and cry.

I did not like myself for doing what I did and yet I could not allow David to continue to bite electrical cords. The spanking worked. David never did it again. But I see that as being because David had never been spanked before. Looking back, I will not apologize for it. The cost of doing nothing would have been too high and it would have been irreversible.

David at two years old

Autism was something that I had seen on Sixty Minutes or some other news magazine. That was the first I had ever heard of it. I never knew anyone, nor knew about anyone who was autistic when I grew up. My wife, Yvette and I already had two children and David was our third and last child. When I saw the segment about an autistic child, it did not cause me any concern. Autism was really rare.

At two years old, my son, David, never acquired language. He had occasionally said a word, but he never had anything I would count as emerging language skills. At least he had no spoken language. He clearly took instructions that one would expect from a two year old. But he never said anything. In my family, (I come from a family of 10 kids) we had late speakers. So I wasn't worried. As far as I was concerned his language would come when it was ready.

At two years old, David started head banging. Two of my brothers had done that when they were little. Again, no big deal. When my brothers would bang their heads on the floor, my father would shrug his shoulders and say, "As long as they don't hurt the floor." I wasn't cavalier, but I was optimistic. My brothers grew out of their head banging phase and I figured that David would grow out of his.

It got worse. Even when my brothers would band their heads you could see that there was a measure of self preservation. If they banged their heads too hard, then the next time would be a lot softer. David was different. After the first few times, his forehead looked like he was budding a unicorn horn. Our parental instincts overruled my experience growing up with my brothers. Yvette and I did not make a big issue out of it. Each time David would get frustrated and start banging his head, we would simply pick him up and get him interested in something else. Yvette and I were lucky. It took maybe a month. David stopped head banging and never took it up again.

David could not stand loud noises. At the time, I did not understand the extent of this aversion. If his brother or his sister cried, David would throw a fit. He would scream loud enough that it did not occur to me that it was the loud noise of his older brother or sister crying that was upsetting him. If loud noises upset him, wouldn't screaming make it worse for him? As with head banging, the idea was to move him away and get him interested in something else. It got him calmed down and peace would be restored in the house. The vacuum cleaner, the drill, any appliance that made a loud noise would make David jump through his skin, yet David delighted in flushing the toilet. I didn't know what to make of that, nor did I think anything should be made of it. Kids like to see cause and effect. Push the handle and watch the water go down.

David had a toy vacuum cleaner my sister gave him that he loved to play with. It seemed that he could stand there moving it back and forth humming like a buddhist monk and listening to the clicking noise that the toy vacuum cleaner made. It was his favorite toy until he got a toy lawnmower that also clicked when it was moved around. Even though David was fascinated by these toys and could play with them for hours, he never objected when we led him off to pursue something else. I thought he was fascinated, but not obsessive. Again, not knowing any better I was not worried.

David never had touch sensitivity. He loved to cuddle and did so with both Yvette and me. He loved to be tickled and he had no trouble with any of us taking his hand. If I was sitting down he would climb into the chair with me just to sit close.

There was a love/hate relationship between David and water. David loved to play in water, but he could not stand to have his clothes wet. He would climb up to the sink and play with the water, and then take his clothes off. At this age, it was nothing to worry about. He would grow out of it.

While this is a description about David, it also says something about my wife and me. Neither of us had any idea about what all of this meant. We did not know what his looking away meant. We did not know what his sound sensitivity meant. We did not know that, yes, some kids learn to talk late, but when all of these things are added together we should worry. And David was not like the one example I had seen on Sixty Minutes. He was cuddly. He was not touch sensitive. He did not destroy the room if his clothes were not laid out for him. He was even tempered. He adapted to changes well. Even when the memory of that one example came into my head, I just knew that David was not autistic.

Autism was unheard of because it was not prevalent back then. I really feel ignorant when I look at myself back then. But then, so was everyone else.