Hiya .. I am new here (obviously from my post count) and I am in a sorta limbo situation with my son. So I am just kinda wndering if anything rings a bell or sounds familiar for anyone out there.
First of all my name is Lissa. I have two children Caelyn is three (almost four) and Gabriel is two (28 months). I am also expecting a baby due in July but that is thought to be delivered in the next few weeks due to complications. My main concerns at present are issues surrounding Gabe.
We started noticing some oddities or differences in him around 19 months. Maybe before then if I really think about it. He started babbling at 11 months old or so... but other than Mama and Dada he really never picked up any words. The pediatrician said don't worry it will come with time. So we kept reading to him and playing with him and trying to spark his language same as we did with my daughter (who now can outtalk just about anyone lol.) Still at nineteen months or so he only had those two words and he seemed to reach a point he refused to even try to talk further. He would point(whole hand waved in the general direction of what he wanted) or he would grab our hands and drag us to be in front of the general area of what he wanted and then we would play guessing games to get whatever it was. Slightly frustrating for us ...very frustrating to him...the longer it took the more upset he would get about us not finding the item.
It was around this time that the bath fights began to escalate. He never really liked baths after he learned to walk. Before then he was fine but he hit a point that they became the enemy. And around 19-20 month that went from just not liking them to out and out screaming hysterical fits as if we were burning him alive in the tub. It would take both my husband and myself to hold him in the tub (even standing up) to bathe him. This has continued and is worse now. We have resorted to damp cloth baths most of the time except once a week or so to wash his hair and scrub him down. And every time he screams and fights so hard I normally have a few scratches and then spend hours calming him back down.
When we went to his 18 months check up though it was again discounted by the pediatrician that things would ease up and it was just stages. She was a little concerned because he was missing milestones also but said we would just watch and see what happened the next few months.
Over the next few months things became increasingly difficult with him. His birthday is two days before christmas and by that time it had reached a point that we couldn't even have a party for him out of fear of his reactions.
What i mean to say is he started going into what I can only call hysterical fits if we took him anywhere other people were... stores became warzones, parks became iffy depending on how crowded they were, and at times even walking out of the house with him was a no no. The family christmas events... with his aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins he preferred to spend in a back room of a house somewhere quiet he could do his own thing. If we would try to get him to interact he would just get upset and go into what I call one of his "fits" so it became clear he needed to do it his own way.
During all this he went from interacting and loving daddy to play with him to basically wanting nothing to do with him. And his attachment to me became obsessive. As in I am stuck with him on my lap most of the day or I have screaming to contend with. I put him down for even a few minutes to go to the bathroom or whatever and he follows me with his screaming in full swing. He went from being able to be put to bed then me walk away to waking up ten or twenty times a night just to make sure I was in bed with him. If he doesn't see me he will walk the house screaming til he is on top of me again. He also has an obsessive pinching habit. He only pinches me. And its almost constant. He screams if i try to distract him or move his hands. He screams if i put him down for doing it. And even if i do this twenty times in five minutes when I pick him back up he will go right back to pinching. If i hold his hands still and cries himself to sleep he will pinch me even in his sleep. I have bruises etc from this but can't find anyway to stop him from doing it. Layered clothes don't work cause he will dig through the layers (upsleeves etc) until he finds skin and if he can't will go into screams.
Then we have the shoe issues. Before the holidays he only wore shoes once a week when we would go out so I guess I just discounted the fights to keep them on him... over the holidays lots of going out... so lots of need for shoes. He started demanding they be off right away after putting them on. Then would want them right back on. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. It reached the point I had to hide the shoes to avoid fits over them. I took him to christmas dinner shoeless because I couldn't face the fight.
So anyhow after christmas settles and such we get to his two year old check up late in January. (it had been rescheduled due to him and my daughter being sick over and over that month after christmas with a nasty flu bug)
We see a new pediatrician at the office we have always gone to named Dr. Trevino. She started asking us the typical milestone questions. We answered negatively to every single one of them. I watched her face get a little concerned. Then she started asking about his language. I explained he has never made it past babbling. And was currently only using about ten words correctly or with any frequency. She looked more concerned. Then she asked about behaviors. And I gave her the run down of our daily life with Gabe.
She says we need to order a bunch of evaluations and such but that she has a good idea whats going on with him but is hesitant to say anything that may worry us unnecessarily.
So first we have a hearing test. His hearing is normal in both ears.
Then she wants a speech evaluation. I am finally getting this done next week (took forever to get an appointment)
She also wants him interviewed by the ECI commission here in Houston. We are still working on this getting set up.
Meanwhile he got really bad sick with a viral infection. We were in and out of the ER with high fevers, dehydration, and then at the last of it a really nasty rash issue. They kept sending us there to get him rehydrated on IV's etc. He has been sick over a month with whatever this thing is and it has ran the list of symptoms with no real known cause. The ER people kept asking me if he was autistic because of how he reacted to things and acted to people. The doctor he saw there on two of the visits strongly urged me to admit him to the hospital to get an evaluation done sooner because he was very concerned about Gabe's issues after asking me tons of questions. My problem is I am a stay at home mom with another child. I am also on bedrest for complications on this pregnancy. And my husband works fulltime so it was not possible to admit him. And to be honest... I was terrified of his reaction after seeing him react so strongly and horrendously to the nurses and such in the ER.
When we went back on follow up to the pediatrician I mentioned the ER doc was thinking he was autistic and she said that is what we are screening for. So I have been doing a lot of reading about it and some stuff it seems is earmarked in his behaviors... however a lot of it isnt. Like he is very loving with me most of the time (barring the pinches) and on "good days" he does enjoy playing with his sister or toys etc. Other little things like that don't seem to add up really.
The pediatrician told me to look up the mchat stuff. Its the same thing she screened him with in her office and after taking and retaking the test and doing all the reading I am scared to say he has failed it miserably on all accounts. Reading things about milestones etc as she suggested I can date his development to have basically stalled out at around 17-19 months of age motor skill wise and even younger for language. I am very worried about all this and not sure what to think or even how to help him. And it feels like this waiting is going to eat me alive to get some sort of "Official" idea of what is going on.
So I thought I would make a post and see what any of you who are experienced with varied degrees of the spectrum have to say about the situation. Because I am truely at a loss here.
