Transcription
Behaviors began about six months of age. And when she was a year old, she lost speech. Very little speech. Mama, dada, and that was it. I also thought she was going deaf at a time, probably age one.
She seemed to stare out the window a lot, and I could not get eye contact with her. She had no acknowledgment of me walking into a room. She did never seem to request me for anything even for food. Her pediatrician, he told me over the phone that I should just put her in an institution. I was I was what's the institution?
A hospital? Yeah. Isn't that nice? Mostly the behavior started at night, but it was invading the day where he would just speak one syllable and babble and pace around. He liked to tie strings to all the doorknobs in the house so that they would he could open them all at once.
And one morning, I came home, and he had been or came downstairs, and he had been up all night and had tied strings at waist level to everything to which a string could be attached. And he was very upset when I undid it. And, upset if I would move, a salt shaker or a pepper shaker, so he couldn't find it. And we had tantrum behavior, difficult to do haircuts, difficult to do baths, difficult to do examinations, difficult to get out of the house on time to do things, to eat. It was a relief to know that there was something that we could put a name to that was causing it.
The neurologist who diagnosed Ruffin was very clear and very blunt with me. He told me that it was possible or likely that Ruffin would never be employed, that he would never work, productively, that he would not know that I loved him nor would he love me, nor would he be likely to marry. And that if I had money, I should probably invest it because I would need it to be able to care for him life time. It was pretty discouraging. And by the end of that evening, I was very appropriately panicked.
We were told, oh, no. No. No. No. It's not like that.
Just keep yourselves happy. Keep yourselves together. You know, make sure that you don't separate over, you know, because a lot of people end up getting divorced because of the stress. And just love him. But, there's a good chance There's a 5050% chance that he won't be able to talk at all.
But if he does talk, he will only be able to, you know, make simple, desire requests. I want things like that. So it'll be like if he did that. And probably, by the time he was 10, he'd be in a home. And for some reason, we walked out of there and we we trusted her.
We we Oh my gosh. And I don't know why we felt okay at that moment. And then, then couple weeks after that, we just were devastated and we couldn't believe what we had heard. Nick was, nonverbal till he was two years old. We had lots of behavioral problems with him, but we didn't really know, what was wrong with him until he was four.
And in between two and four, we had a lot of social problems at school that were somewhat mysterious. He had a hard time adapting to, any kind of day care situations. This culminated in, preschool where we got a call one day saying, you know, I'm really worried about your son because he's just lying down on the floor. He's not working with the other kids. And, he was also tracing things on the floor like, the patterns of blocks and following them.
But when I got there, it was very dramatic because it was a whole room of kids playing sort of around the perimeter of the room with their PlayStations doing things. And in the center of the room, sucking his thumb, which was curled up on his blanket was was Nick. I was given a prognosis by another doctor who essentially told me to take him home and make him comfortable, put him in a special education class in public school, wanted to not be stressed out about anything because wasn't that much I could do. What you really have to do, I think, as a parent when you first start is just not be afraid and not blame yourself or get away from the negative emotions and just start to really do what's positive because there's a lot you can do. You just have to get over the blaming of yourself and the why did this happen to me and there's no end to this.
Once you're over those initial steps and stages, I think you become very proactive. There's a lot of good intervention right now for children with autism, and there's a lot of adults out there who are amongst us and working, who perhaps used to be autistic and nobody knows because they recovered. We had gone to a parents group meeting, and Doreen Gram Shea was there, and she talked about the therapy. She was very upbeat, and, she said that, she said that, oh, don't worry about it. We'll have him talking.
At a certain point, you're gonna you're gonna wish that you're gonna wish that we never taught him how to talk. And I said I said, I understand what you're saying, but I will never ever say that, and I never ever have. Autism is a childhood developmental disorder that is characterized by problems or delays or impairments in basically three areas of functioning. First area is social skills. So children with autism have pretty significantly delayed social skills.
They won't have eye contact with anyone. They won't develop peer relationships. They won't develop friendships or wanna play with another child. The second area is communication. So children with autism will generally have either delayed language or language that's not appropriate to context.
And the third area is what's called, self stimulatory or ritualistic behavior. These are things like hand flapping or body rocking, lining up their, their toys instead of playing with them, those types of things. If you have a total of six symptoms within these three areas, you will receive a diagnosis of autism. If you have fewer than that, but you still have pervasive delays within those three areas, then you will get a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder or PDD. Now if you don't have a language delay, but you'd still have those kind of aberrant behaviors and you still have the social delays, then you'll have a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.
So there are very subtle differences between them, and they are all part of the autism spectrum, these different, diagnoses. And of course, if a child has fewer delays or less pronounced delays, they're likely to do better. But even if children have symptoms in all areas and if they are still young, you can pretty much get rid of all those symptoms and teach the child to function normally in many cases. Here we go. There.
Woah. It's still there. Go ahead. Woah. Doreen told me that he would recover, and Doreen told me that he would go to regular kindergarten.
ABA is, an intervention that's based on, modifying consequences and antecedents to a behavior. So through this type of intervention, you, change what's happening before a child's behavior and what's happening after a child's behavior, and therefore, you change the child's behavior by doing this. Now, what's involved in ABA is decreasing challenging behaviors or behaviors that are maladaptive and inappropriate and increasing skills that are deficient. So when you when I have a child coming in at age, let's say, three, their chronological age is three. But when you test them, they're functioning like a one year old.
So now I have a two year gap that I need to catch this child of. And by the time the child's four, that gap's gonna be three years. And by the child, which the time he's five, that gap's gonna increase. Now if I start intervention with a five year old child whose age chronological age is five, and his mental age has still stayed around one or two, it's a much harder job. It's impossible for me to use the next two or three years to catch him up because he'll be seven.
He'll be eight. There it is very, very difficult to teach all the skills that a seven or eight year old needs. It's not so difficult to teach all the skills that a two year old needs. So, after the first meeting, which is usually the diagnosis or confirmation of diagnosis, we will conduct a series of assessments. And these are both standardized tests where we're measuring things like IQ or language ability according to the age of the child or adaptive functioning as well as skills assessments.
So these that's where we're looking at exact skills. So, is this child able to understand action words? Is this child able to pick up labels that we name? Is the child able to play with a a friend? Does the child have appropriate eye contact?
Very, very specific skills. Once we've established that, we can generate a program because the child's program has to be very specific for him or her so that you're only teaching those skills that are deficient in that particular child and not just sort of doing a cookbook type of approach. And the amazing thing is that as soon as you start teaching some of the basic skills, the child's challenging behaviors drop. Like, one of the very first things we teach is requesting. As soon as you teach a child how to request for things he or she wants, he no longer has to tantrum to get those things.
So the tantrums go down immediately after the child picks up requesting or manding programs. The therapists are generally extremely positive. The whole concept of ABA is based on reinforcement. When you, ask a child to do something, there has to be a fair level of reinforcement so that the child is motivated. Touch me.
And so, the therapists are extremely positive, and they they bring a lot of both social reinforcement and even tangible type of reinforcers for the children so that they will continue. A GI at intake was actually, you know, what we would consider a very classic case. She had no language. She was very distant from her family. She had very poor eye contact, really disconnection from all social environments.
She had, very minimal, appropriate play skills. They were all very rote and preservative. And she even had self injurious behaviors and she used to bang her head when she got frustrated on the ground. I relate to the first three months how difficult they were letting go. That was the hard part is entrusting someone else with your child.
You know, you're giving up your sole responsibility or concerns to to someone else. Handing her over, that was probably my biggest tough thing once and Doreen helped me a lot with that. I remember talking to her personally and went, Doreen, I can't take it. But we we did it. When they get involved with us, one of the things we do is we really take them through step by step, and we teach them not only how to handle their children's challenging behaviors, but how to teach their children skills that are adaptive and help them lead more normal lives every single day.
I think the involvement we have, if you can imagine having, you know, therapists in your house thirty, forty hours a week, in itself is such a huge support to the family. She was thirty six, thirty eight hours a week with Viv. Good. Good looking. There once was a rabbit named Scotty.
Scotty. Scotty was white and black. White and black? Uh-huh. He liked to eat carrots and celery.
And celery? Mhmm. What was the rabbit's name? What happened? Bunny.
Mhmm. Bunny name is What was the bunny's name? Okay. I'll say it again. Are you listening?
Yeah. Okay. Listen. Good. There once was a bunny named Scotty.
Scotty? Scotty was black and white. Black and white. Mhmm. He liked to eat carrots and celery.
Carrots and celery. Yeah, hands down. What was the bunny's name? Raymond Raymond. No.
What was the bunny's name? But the name is Janet. No. What was the bunny's name? Scottie.
Scottie. Good. What was the bunny's name? Scottie. Good.
What color was the bunny? Black and white. Good. White. What did he like to eat?
He was and Try. I don't want Oh, good. Celery. Salary. Yeah.
What does he like to eat? Salary. That's a hard thing. What else does he like to eat? Carrots.
Good. Okay. So what does he like to eat? Celery and Kalates. Very good.
What was the bunny's name? Bunny name is No. What was that bunny's name? No. What was the bunny's name?
Sk Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Ska Scottty. Good. Good. What color was he? Black and white.
Very good. What was his name? Scottty. Very good. Good job.
All done. Thirteen, twelve years later, I have two daughters of my own. So it was, you know, Jana was always considered my first daughter. I actually still have, which is kind of funny. I remember it.
I still have her ID bracelet on my key chain, which she gave to me the day they moved out of town. So, it's something that I always keep dear to me. As well as, I think I think one of the other things that, you know, left such a good impression with me was how the again, how much of an impact I had on the overall family, not just Jana. You know, mom and dad really took to heart the the recommendations and things that I had for them as well as the the supervision at the time. You know, I was close with all the siblings and made sure that they were playing with Jana and integrating her and felt comfortable with her disability, but yet didn't treat her any different.
And I do remember that one of the times when she was older, probably about first grade or so, where she said she finally asked, why do you come and see me? You know, and it wouldn't that's how we talked about it. Just, well, you know, I can come and help you so that you can do well in school, so that you can talk good with your friends, so make sure that, you know, you understand things because sometimes friends do things that are confusing and stuff like that. And I said, as soon as you know all that, just tell me because then I don't need to come anymore. And sure enough that day came, which was good.
Just put the cameras here. How can I It's you pretend? Rent out means it's on. Oh, yeah. I'm sure it does.
It's not blank. Oh, and now it's playing. I saw it. It wasn't playing. I caught you.
Now it's playing. How would you describe how Janet's doing now? Teenager, non compliant. We need therapy again. They have a mind of their own.
Hi. Hi. So, mom. Do you have a boyfriend yet? No.
No? No. Good. Or not one that you'd wanna talk about in front of mom. But we saw that boy at the Cal Poly game.
What Cal Poly? He lives by grandma and he bugs me all the time. Oh, well, we always see him. Because he bugs me. That's right.
He always follows me. It's so creepy. Wait. You don't like him? No.
No. But at one time, I'm grateful because my friend, I didn't know how to get my grandma's house and so I made them lost for about an hour. It's like a mile away. And so but the gate, like, she lives in a gay community and the time changes. I mean, not the time, but the password.
So I didn't know the night password and so I couldn't get in. But then he was luckily, you know, outside and I yelled at him and he opened it for us. Oh wow. That was the only reason that's good. She draws beautifully.
Wow. It's really neat. You've been with, your art lessons For a year. Yeah. Right there in Pismo Beach.
About a year and a half. That's really great. Well, he wants me to do people, trees, just like animals. And that's basically it. It's only pencil.
Mhmm. You got your first artist job from him. He said he'd pay you. First to do sketching. Oh, I'm gonna say he has two pugs.
So so So you have like your first artist commission? Artist new mission. Yeah. That's wonderful. That's a big deal.
Yeah. We have had a very different family life from the time I mean, it's very hard to send your kid off to school at three years old, you know, to public school. And it was difficult having all of the people in our house. I mean, we had a full team. We were continually scheduling all of that and, you know, we were working through Christmas.
We were working through Easter. You know, it was pretty dire the first couple of years. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.
Very good. So with Ruffin, I started from the very beginning. So it was he could make sounds, and I think he had a few words, not very many. But, none of them were under ST control. So he might have blurred out a word here and there, but he wasn't reliably responding or using the same word for an item or a greeting or any of that.
Say, mommy. Good. Say Donna. Donna. Good.
Say dah. Duh. Good. Say Donna. Mommy.
That sounds wonderful. So I remember sitting down the first day, and he really liked dinosaurs. So I wanted to teach him, like, the names of some of the dinosaurs because that was relevant to what his interests were. The first day, I think he actually was able to chain some of the, words. I think rhinoceros.
Say rhinoceros. Rhinoceros. You have to work on a not to say notsarous. Say not. Not rhinoceros.
Say no. Say. Good. Say good talking. Say.
Good. Robin? Say. Good. Good.
Serus. Na serus. Good. It's very important to identify in each child, exactly what types of skills are missing and whether or not it's possible to teach those skills. So for instance, if you have a child who is really not able to learn from their environment because, their attention is very deficient or they have a very significant problem in memory.
So they can't really learn anything new. Everything they learn, they forget after a while. You can identify those types of processing issues, then you can actually reverse them. You can actually teach the child how to improve attention, how to improve memory. And so as you're teaching skills, you're not just teaching content material of skills, you're actually teaching the child ways to survive and ways to continue learning.
He had about forty hours a week of one to one instruction, with the applied behavior analysis at home. And then in addition to that, he had about thirty hours a week in early childhood special education. There, they were not interested in teaching special education. There, they were not interested in teaching him to talk. They were interested in teaching him to sign, and, we had videotapes of what went on in that classroom.
I was convinced the classroom was a safe babysitting opportunity. So we used those thirty hours to plan what we were going to do with him. But it did not take us very long to figure out as a family that it was going to work with him. We saw some very immediate improvements. His IQ scores began to climb from an original Bailey score of 50 to, scores that approached 94 on a Stanford Binet after a little while, and then his IQ has continued to rise so that now it's about, in the hundred and twenties.
So we saw the kind of results that we're seeing in the research. What do you see flying in the air? Airplane. Airplanes fly in the air? What else flies in the air?
Birds. Birds? Do you see any birds? Oh, they could see it's coming. They could be they're coming, but I don't see any birds today.
It must be too cold. What else do you see? Birds just freezing. Yes. The birds might be freezing.
That would be sad, wouldn't it? Like a blanket. I don't know if birds wear blankets, but that's a good idea. Well, it was very funny when we finally got to the end of it, and Evelyn told us we could stop doing all the things that we have been taught to do, that it was okay, that Ruffin was really gonna be okay. That was wonderful.
People have met Ruffin who are school psychologists or psychologists, and they don't get it, that he ever had autism. They cannot see it. But he's he's in a college preparatory program, in a very fine Catholic boarding school. He's making straight A's, And he's doing that with the ability to speak that he learned from cart because I don't know how he would have been able to function if he hadn't learned to talk and learned to listen. And so, he has very high listening skills.
He has a very nice high vocabulary. He's reading very well now. I like science and math. Language is okay. I like, I like good books.
I don't care if I read. I think he wants to go to college to be an engineer. He's always been interested in sticks and strings and constructions, and, he certainly has a lot of men on both sides of his family who are engineers. I buy a new issue, not to advertise the magazine the RC pieces, t blade. It's electronics, and I've always been a fan of the new remote control.
You can get titanium, pieces, but that's, like, insanely expensive. And they have brushless motors, which is like a piece of metal touching the axle. So, like, his brushes are, somewhat inefficient, but they're a lot cheaper and, mature technology, so they're so all cheap. You have to have a heat sink for that. I don't find it getting hot, but if you don't, they're like, no, which is bad.
I thought maybe if we were really lucky, we might get to Asperger Syndrome. But I really have a very normal kid now, and lots of normal worries, but not extraordinary ones. I think when he came in and met with doctor Grandpoche, he only had a few sounds, a few words. He understood a few instructions that were, situational at best, during meal times, during, you know, times when you're going out, to play or something like that so he would know to get his shoes or to get the cup or what have you, but his expressive language was extremely limited. He had a good range of of self stimulatory behaviors.
He was flapping, hand flapping, toe walking, some hyperactivity. There was also some, motors motor deficiencies to some extent. Eye contact was poor as well. Look at me. What's your name?
My name is Brett. Ask me. Lisa, what's your name? My name is Lisa. How old are you?
I'm pretty old. Ask no. Ask me. Look. Ask me.
Wait? No. How old are you? My friend is old. Look.
He said, how old are you? Good job. I'm 25. The first year and a half, we were we were, they were doing drills every day. Things were going pretty well.
He was he was able to talk. He's starting to talk, learning more words, learning what they meant. But, you know, he was having more eye contact, but not real good eye contact. And one of the things CAR did for us, they always hooked us up with, alternative providers, you know, good speech therapists, referrals to, you know, whoever whoever they thought we needed in addition, medical doctors that were doing cutting edge things. You know, Doreen was on top of that.
And one of the things she said was, you know, you need to get him to a a a vision specialist. Okay? That that that do vision therapy. And I was, I don't know what that is, but we've done it all, so I made an appointment. You know?
And, the doctor, and he says, well, he has absolutely no ability to use his central vision. And he explained what that meant to me. And so what that meant is the only way his brain could really un understand to see things is using his peripheral vision. So it took me about ten minutes to figure out what he said and what he meant. What he meant was is that Brett was looking at everybody the whole time like that because that's the only way he could do it.
I don't like broccoli. Brett, look at me. Why do you like grandma? She's nice to you. To me?
Yes. She's because she because she because she is nice to me. Good. The very devastating thing about autism is that you not only have to, take in and deal with such a pervasive and significant diagnosis. I mean, any kind of diagnosis when someone tells you your child is sick with a cold, it's upsetting.
But when you hear something like your child has autism, that's very difficult to take. And, what makes it even more difficult, I think, is that, there's not a very good understanding of what autism is about. So your physician is unlikely to tell you what that means, first of all. And secondly, people don't realize enough that recovery is possible from autism, that there are ways that you can help your child become much better and actually recover from the diagnosis. The general medical community believes that this is a lifelong disorder, unfortunately.
I always, you know, I I I wondered what would happen if I had listened to the person that diagnosed him. As the years went on, it made me so angry. It's one of the one of the things that that angered me the most about the whole situation was that this person almost cheated Brett out of his whole life. There were a lot of, times when I was with him that he just seemed to figure things out. We always had different various targets that we worked on.
His t Richard and I would just constantly go about to different skills in a variety of different ways to really focus on generalization, so he wasn't memorizing anything, and nothing was wrote. A lot of it was, at that point, even though we had a table and chair, we really weren't doing much at the table and chair unless it was like homework. I'll talk about the last day, if I could do it without without crying. A lot of this stuff is really it was really emotional for me at the end because we had worked so hard. We had done so many different things.
We did vision therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, all those years. And of course, card card was the main, the main, instigator of all the progress, you know. Of course, it was. The last few weeks were very hard. It was very hard.
You'd think I would be happy, and I was happy, but it was like you just couldn't believe that it was over, and it was so emotional. I had a hard time keeping it together the last couple weeks, but we had, you know, all the different, pieces of equipment. You have it, you know, the table that they can sit at, and they do their drills every day, and they do their work. So towards the end, the last, like, six months or so, it was just Richard and Kathy coming. And, you know, we're we're getting getting close to the end and I sicced the table and I turned it over and I had his grandmother's.
His grandmother was there for a lot of the time when when I was at work and they did the sessions. We had her sign it. We had Richard sign it. We had Kathy sign it. I signed it, and Brett signed it.
On the last day, you know, Richard signed it. Richard was the last one to come. He signed off, you know, and shook Brett's hand and said, you're done. You know, and Brett was very happy. We brought the table home and his father and him put it up in the rafters in the attic.
And Brett says, I'll never sit at that table again. And I said, no, you won't. You don't ever have to sit there again. And it was, like, closure for him, you know. He has five or six friends that he can call up, and and he enjoys being with them.
They go to the movies, and they hang out. He he's a he likes to be a couch potato when he's allowed to, which is which is fine. He's he's in the scouts, and he likes it well enough. He likes his video games, and he's starting to be interested in girls, which the other the other kids in his little clique are just starting to also. You're asking that.
Okay. Now it's Yeah. I gotta get a new controller. Or I have to get a new player one first. See if you can fix it.
Alright. Alright. Hey, mom. Yeah? Tomorrow, we're going to the store and buy a new controller.
Okay? What? Mom, I mean, I meant, please go to the store and buy a new controller. Yeah. I'm gonna try to do that.
What do you guys wanna do when you grow up? I wanna be a police officer because you get to help people. Sounds good. What grades do you get? Page.
That's impressive. My mom's gonna be $10 for a VA idea. I just get good grades and then I tell my parents, like, if they if I wanna sleep over at French, I say, but mom, I got straight As. And she wants to You can also use get your parents to buy you some. Yeah.
That's that's pretty much So the his plans for the future, I do see him getting married. You know? I don't see any reason why he wouldn't. He is pretty good with his relationships. I think I think he is really special as long as he touches other people, as long as he has relationships with other people, which was supposed to be impossible for him.
He came in at four and a half, so he was quite old when he came in for intake. Typical tantrum, noncompliance, didn't want interaction, screamed the most when you made him play, or were trying trying to teach him how to play. A lot of self stimulatory behaviors on objects like traffic lights or, signs of places. He had a lot of, probably one word labels, so he knew labels of objects. There was no descriptor language.
There was no, adjectives. There's no verbs. Primarily, everything was either I or he was just naming the name of object. He had somewhere between twenty five and forty hours at different times. He did some public school speech therapy, which was a complete waste of time.
He never did occupational therapy. Maybe he should have done that. He's never done any biomedical interventions. Those things weren't available when he was younger. At the first time something like that happened for me, I was really scared because I didn't know it was going to happen.
And I didn't and I was shy back then. The first time therapists came over? Yeah, cause Cause I didn't know what these strangers were doing in my house. I didn't know why they were here anyway. I just wasn't aware of myself and what was going on.
At the time I didn't even know about what I was suffering from. Ciao. One, two, three. Oh, I need it. No.
I need it. I can't mine. It's quiet. I need it. I need one.
Ciao. Yeah. It was so awful. I mean, the first two years, I just told like I just said, I'm in hell. I mean, this is all very, you know, internal and not really about Nick.
It's, you know, me reflecting on how I felt. But I felt as if I'd been tricked here. I had these two kids and I was so in love with them and I thought it was so great to be a parent and all of a sudden it was as if it had all been turned on its head and somebody was mocking me and saying you, you know, you were totally wrong about this. It was like being on another planet. And I guess it probably was really, really acutely terrible for about two years, and then it got better.
Hey. Give me five. Oh, up high. Down low. There's no there's oh, you got me.
Mommy. K. What I always tell parents at intake when they're, struggling with the thought that it's actually possible to teach so much or when will their child actually have a a positive behavior or when will they see this, cycle getting worse and and when will it start to get better? What I always tell them is, this is actually a blessing because with normally developing children, they change so fast. They acquire skills so fast that you will never really appreciate what they're learning.
But with your child, you're gonna appreciate every single step when you see him say for the first time, mommy, I love you, you're never gonna forget that. When you for the first time, you see him play with a sibling, with a peer, you're never gonna forget that. Every step of the way, you're you're going to be reminded of of the effort that it took and now what he's accomplished. So it's really wonderful to be able to see those skills developing step by step. I did hate it, to be honest, but I can't remember why.
It was just probably I just didn't like to be forced down to try everything. Like, I I've actually had it together, or I was afraid to do it. But at the time when I just realized that I needed to do this. Count. One, two, three, four, five.
Fantastic, Dee. Give me five, buddy. Alright. Can I have a hug? He is correct, I think, in that at a certain point without us ever knowing, he made a decision.
And he's about the hardest working person you'll ever meet. And he has the best attitude of anybody I know. He's an incredibly cheerful, forgiving, sweet person. And those qualities in combination are responsible, I think, for a lot of his success as a person. I think the major point I really realized that was when I began school for the first time.
I just wanna be able to be a regular kid out there in the world and get along with others and be able to have my friends. I wanted, I just wanted to have a good life. I just wanted to be able to go out in the world and fight and just not have any autism keep me from doing so. So I decided that I just needed that therapy anyway. I just wanted.
Okay, guys. One ass, eight. Legs, two hands, a nose, wings, a saddle, a beak, a teeth, and a cowboy hat. What has eight legs? A nose, saddle, teeth, and a cowboy hat?
What? A man on a horse holding a chicken. Where where did where did you learn that joke? Well, I just made it up by myself so I could try to become good at making these jokes. I, which I was not good at when I was younger because I always gave something away, the joke.
But now I'm better at that. Well, the things I enjoy most with my friends is being able to share my music with them. We play some ball baseball. We either go to the movies or play video games or basically that's what we do. Sometimes we even fight for pleasure.
Not for not because we hate each other, but just because we don't have anything better to do. And we talk about life. He's learning how to drive a car. I mean, he's talking about maybe becoming an exchange student. He's studying a foreign language.
He likes girls a lot. He's playing guitar and he's, writing lyrics and writing music. He's writing his own songs. I wish I could be a rock star because I really, owing to my father, I've inherited a love of music. I play guitar now.
I used to play piano, but then intro shifts. But I hope one day that this brings me back to the keys. There's a lot of scientific research that shows, children recover from autism, and yet still, the medical community in general is, not aware of how prevalent recovery is. More than half of the children receiving intervention at an early age recover completely. And when I say recover, I mean, they are scoring, normally on intelligence testing, on language testing, on adaptive functioning tests.
They are mainstreamed into regular education schools and, the diagnosis is removed. In other words, a psychiatrist or psychologist seeing this child would not be able to say they ever had a diagnosis improve with these types of interventions, with ABA therapy for instance, and they, continue to become more and more functional as they get older. And, they they find jobs and they go to school. A lot of the children who are still with us are actually finishing high school now. The things that really, really worked the most were just hard work, which is what the therapy is.
You get in there and you teach them, you train them, and you go over and over and over again, tilt it. It's cemented in their pathway, then you go on to the next one and build the next little block. And then before you know it, the whole pathway is filled in, and they can walk across the little bridge and go off and do everything that they need to do. It's a tough road. Yeah.
But you gotta do it. It was worth it. Yeah. There's but you as a parent, you don't see that it's worth that it's gonna pay off or it's gonna be worth it. You're just.
It's so hard to imagine that they're going to be okay or they're going to function somehow any little bit. That's all you grasp on to. You don't think that they can be a whole person. Whatever it takes, do it quickly. Do it early.
Do it hard in the beginning. The payoffs are enormous. I think we've saved our family an enormous amount of money and financial ruin. I don't know how we would have cared for him for a lifetime. And I don't think that the social service support is going to be there in the future.
I think it's very important to get an early diagnosis and to move, do whatever you have to do financially to make it possible to do something between ages three and five, four and six. But don't wait. And, don't wait and hope because I don't think anything good happens that way. I tell people, and I don't mean this out of disrespect to Nick, but when he was four, he was a blob. And he was there was a person in there, but that person was in real danger of never being educable.
He's been educated. You know, CARD taught him how to learn and he took all that and he's made a very conscious study of this world and trying to figure out what he couldn't understand. I just hope that one day these kids don't have to won't have to go through such horror in their life of being autistic and having trouble speaking, reading or writing. It would just be good if there's a way we can all be, we can all be normal. Our passion's on fire to bring you back.
Working with the doctors who left the pack and all the greedy hands that hide the truth. We're gonna find a key. It unlocks of mystery because we're all in this thing together. There's hope for you to heal. Our dreams for you are real.
There's hope There's hope for us to be here. There's hope for you to heal. Our dreams for you are real. There's hope for us. A good day in my life is, days when I do, exit interviews, when our children recover and they come in for their last, clinic with me.
That is a very good day.