Learning that my son had autism

     We started by first trying to rule out other things. We took him to a pediatric ENT to rule out that he didn't have fluid in his ears since there was a family history on my side. Well the doctor checked his ear and said no his ears were clear. He then suggested that we see the audiologist as well as have a speech evaluation. We took him to the audiologist to check his hearing. Hearing test came back that his hearing was perfectly fine. We had to wait a couple weeks to get his speech evaluation. The day of his speech evaluation came and as he was working with her he was not paying attention to what she was wanting him to do. His speech evaluation finished and as the speech pathologist was talking to us she mentioned she thought he showed signs of autism. She felt he needed a full evaluation to find out for sure. My heart sank hearing that from her. I got to the car with my husband and son and I just lost it. I started going through a immediate grief/denial process about what we had. Just been told I tried to keep telling myself that she didn't know what she was talking about. I just didn't want to hear that something was wrong with my son.

      The day I got the official diagnosis of autism for my son was difficult at first. I remember going for his two days of evaluations and knowing in that the last appointment of the second day I would find out what they felt was going on and where to get started on helping him. When the clinical psychologist said he had autism my first initial feeling was to blame myself...thinking what did I do wrong when I was pregnant...if you are a mom you know the feeling. I felt like my world had just collapsed around me. As soon as I got past that official "shock" of his diagnosis. And once i stopped feeling bad for myself and for my son. Once I looked at my son and how innocent he was i knew i had to do everything in my power to get him the assistance that he needed. I was going to be his advocate and not back down until i got what i was told he needed from the people that did his evaluations. I was prepared to fight....I started researching everything and anything I could find about autism. I contacted our local infants and toddlers to try to get assistance with therapy....all those issues I will share in another blog post. I then started looking into private ones...I will post that process in another blog post as well.