Oh Happy Day!

Let me set the back ground up here first.... Zachary sees a Developmental Pediatrician. He is the doctor that gives children their official diagnosis of ADHD, Autism, etc. Zachary was diagnosed in June of 2005, and since then we've been returning to the doc for follow-ups and progress checks every few months. These are one hour appointments which entail a half hour of testing for Zachary, on his own in the room with the doc with us watching through a two way mirror, and then the second half hour is reviewing his progress (well, hopefully PROGRESS) and his therapy/school plan, etc as well as answering our questions. As you can imagine, this is a very stressful hour for Matt and I as we want nothing more than to hear those miracle words "I don't think that Zachary falls on the Autism Spectrum anymore" that we may never hear. But we always hope, right :-) Seriously though, hearing and seeing someone evaluating your little child in this serious of a manner is incredibly overwhelming, and it's never an appointment that I go to lightly. I'm always extremely nervous and very anxiety stricken. Even though all of our appointments thus far have shown improvement, it's improvement from a DELAY that still exists. Stressful. Not fun to be a part of when it's your child.

So today's appointment started out very different for me. I guess that because we've really, truly seen a major improvement in Zachary's speech and his social abilities over the last few months, I had just mentally relaxed a bit without even realizing it. Usually I have a list of questions (typed) ready to go for these appointments. Usually I'm all stressed over him feeling well and not being sick for this appointment. Today, I woke up and realized that I hadn't considered how his health was, nor had I even retrieved the folder from the file cabinet which definitely had no list of questions prepared. WHAT??? ME??? No way! It felt good to make this realization that I am calmer about all of this now. I KNOW that he's doing better and I'm not stressing over a doc telling me that.

So the appointment and testing were a smashing success!!! He sat completely attentive in his chair opposite the doc and participated without distraction, as he always has tuned out in the past, for the full evaluation. The doc's summary was that he had "increased reciprocity and attention as well as decreased distraction" vs. past evals. AWESOME! That alone would have been enough to celebrate for me! This is a kid who if he's not interested, he wouldn't focus in the past. So for him to sit there for half an hour, in his chair, and participate without getting down and running around or tuning out the doc - amazing! Oh but it gets better... His overall scores for both expressive (what he can identify/say) and receptive (what he understands) were in the normal range. His expressive was higher actually, which is a first for him - and a great thing! He scored at a 4 year 6 month age equivalence, and he's 4 years 1 months old!!! Please know that this doesn't mean that he's "normal" in his expressive language, as he's very much not - but just that cognitively he's doing great! His eye contact with the doc was the best it's ever been and he remained happy and enthralled through it all. This was a breakthrough and the doc couldn't quit saying how excited he was about Zachary's progress, which he's never said before.

So for the first time I cried while watching him behind the two way mirror with every correct answer that he gave and every smile and every high five from the doc. I was proud. Proud of how damn hard my little boy has been working (thankfully, without even realizing it) and proud of how dedicated Matt and I have been and how it's paying off. But mostly just proud for our family that we can finally start charting real progress and real accomplishments and not having to make more out of the very little things, as we've had to do in the past to hold on to hope. Hope is very real these days. And doctor's appointments won't be as horrifying anymore.

And that awful, worse day of my life back on June 17th, 2005 when we were told that our son is Autistic, and I thought I'd never make it through this - well, that's a very distant memory now and I'm happy to never cry those tears of pity and sorrow for Zachary again. He's doing so well. Not much else to say.