My Kid is a Damn Nutter

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Queen of the Ryche

Anything new, Clod?

Well, we're still in the midst of his full intestinal cleanout. (I screwed up and gave him fruit just before the original lab sample collection date, so I didn't end up getting that taken care of until yesterday.) The poop is still a-flowing in a neverending torrent, but at least he doesn't mind the taste of the magnesium citrate, so I'm only nominally holding him down when I give it to him. We're up to 3 Tablespoons every couple of hours with no end in sight.

In other news, I got to be all bitter a few days ago when some insurance paperwork arrived in the mail. The neurologist (whom we had to go see as a formality back in April for an official diagnosis by someone qualified to do so) billed my insurance $500 freaking dollars for what was, no exaggeration, less than 15 minutes of time spent with us, 90% of which was me describing again all the behaviors that I had just thoroughly described to his nurse. But because he's a "real doctor" and he's only charging people indirectly rather than straight out-of-pocket, no one thinks that's a fucking scam.

Yet when I pay less than $120 for over an hour of face-time with a biomedical nutritionist, and I walk away with no less than twenty pages of information specific to my son's current symptoms, including recipes tailored to his known sensitivities, plus then receive several followup emails from the office reiterating all the next steps we talked about at the visit, and replies to my direct questions about things that have come up while following those instructions in the last two weeks... oh no, those people are "so expensive" because they refuse to deal with insurance. I am thrilled to pay Thoughtful House out-of-pocket. So far they have earned every penny of it. And it's so disgusting that people can't put two and two together and realize they are ultimately paying for the ridiculous doctors' fees that go through insurance. Anyway, I'm done with that rant now.

We're going to start a cool new thing next week at the occupational therapy clinic. It's called auditory integration therapy, and it's based on the same principal as all of the other sensory stuff we've been doing, that audio signals are not being interpreted correctly by the brain, and with the right input it can be retrained to function along normal pathways. You use this set of 20-30 CDs that sound just like normal elevator music, but they actually do funky stuff with specific frequencies being played at certain intervals--including the really high and low vibrations that most people can't even hear, but studies have shown the brain is still picking up on them. Ideally you listen to them through headphones, because that directly resonates the bones in the inner ear and makes the strongest connections, but some benefit can still be achieved if you play them over a speaker in a room, as long as the room is pretty quiet and the speakers are of high enough quality to play all the extreme frequencies. I assured our therapist that I do, in fact, have audio equipment up to the task. Unfortunately the discs are pretty expensive, since they're meant to be purchased by therapy offices rather than individuals, and I've been told that the copy-protection on them is extremely good. So we're going to do the full set over time in her office, and in the meantime I'm going to order a single disc for home use and see what kind of benefits we get from playing them through the speakers.

But the real reason I want one for home use is for Minifobette. She's inching closer and closer to having her own diagnosis, and one of her traits is definitely auditory defensiveness (as opposed to Minifob who was all about the tactile defensiveness, refusing to wear long-sleeve shirts or have his hair cut and such.) She screams and covers her ears at specific noises that aren't especially loud or grating, but they freak her out every time. Like when the water is running in the downstairs sink, or whenever this one character is talking on a particular Elmo DVD. He can be on the screen just fine, but as soon as he talks she throws her hands up and starts shrieking. Supposedly the misinterpreted audio signals are causing her to hear certain frequencies much louder than they actually are. Auditory Integration Therapy has been shown to help all kinds of autistic kids, but of course the greatest benefits are seen by those who have obvious auditory sensitivities. Anyway, it's going to be hard enough to get one kid to sit there with headphones on for any length of time, but two would be extremely difficult. So hopefully we'll get at least some benefit by just broadcasting it in the room while they're playing together.

But man I wish I could see what those waveforms look like...

Edit to add: Oh yeah, crazy story about one of the series of AIT discs: the discs all have different music on them, since the music itself isn't really what's important, and a handful of them have nature sounds like whalesong and stuff. The people who developed these particular CDs said that at first, the groups of autistic kids they were testing them on were freaking out and hated the ones with dolphin sounds on them, and they got one of the older ones who spoke well to explain that the dolphins sounded "upset," that she could tell they were "locked up in prison." So they scoured audio libraries until they found dolphin sounds that were definitely recorded out in the ocean instead of from dolphins in captivity somewhere, and the kids did a complete 180 and said they liked the sounds now. The engineers swore they couldn't hear any difference between the two kinds of dolphins, but all the kids agreed that the ocean dolphins were "happy."