November 16, 2009 @ 17:15

On Friday afternoon, Puppy visited his doctor.  First of all, he’s gained two pounds!  Yay for the boy who only eats about fifteen different foods!  And we talked about the troubles he’s been having at school.  The tension, the racing, what is apparently his medicine wearing off a few hours too soon.  After discussing all the options, we decided to go forward with changing the way in which he takes his medicine.  Same actual medicine, just a different delivery method and hopefully it will have a more gradual and long lasting release into his little system.  Less of a valley for him to be slipping into in the morning and less of a ski jump to be flying off of in the afternoons.  The options were a patch or a pill.  As I’ve seen his previous interactions with band aids, we said no to the patch pretty quickly.  It is a little early for it, but swallowing pills is a life skill, that really, everybody has to learn.  So we opted for the pill form.  Saturday and Sunday he didn’t do too well with it.  God love his daddy, but I suspect he wasn’t as hard line with him as I sometimes am.  Or maybe I just have my bluff in better right now.  Because despite his not managing it over the weekend, this morning he did it.  On the second take no less.  The chocolate milk was a good call.  And when he got a little look of surprise on his face after he swallowed it down and then grinned, I thought great!  This is going to be great!  I gave him a little high five and was telling him what a good job he’d done when his little face froze and giant tears welled up in his eyes and began to spill over.  It took me a minute to get him to calm down and tell me what had upset him so suddenly.  As it turns out, the schools anti-drug program had convinced him that pills are bad.  All pills.  Well, yes, frequently pills are bad, but not all the time.  When it dawned on him what he had just done, he was terrified that he was going to die.  He began rubbing and tugging at his little tummy frantically.  He had taken a pill.  He asked me what it was going to do inside him.  I quickly explained to him that he was going to be okay.  That the pill was just a way for him to take his medicine.  We talked back and forth about the fear and what pills actually do and what was going on in his tummy.  He calmed down quickly.  Because he’s rational and capable of understanding.  Which is where my frustration comes from.  Was there really no discussion of the difference between medicine and illegal drugs in all of the anti-drug speeches they gave at the school?  And was he sitting there all weekend at his daddy’s house thinking that his daddy was trying to kill him?  I mean really, how hard is it to have whole conversations with kids instead of giving them partial truths.  I suppose that depends on your idea about the truth.  I remember when Bear’s school was teaching them that alcohol was evil and having to explain to him that neither I nor his daddy was going to hell for having a beer with a bowl of chili.  That level of puritanical narrow-mindedness actually scares me.  And is it really so hard to talk to children and give them the whole story?  I don’t mean more than they are able to understand or more than is appropriate, but at least respect the fact that they are reasoning beings.  They take what you give them and draw conclusions.  And if you don’t give them enough, they will draw wrong ones.  We just need to remember that. 

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Autism?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.