Adam got his B12 shot last night, for whatever it's worth, and had a pretty good day. He is still pretty darned stimmy though. Today he rediscovered his "number cards" which are like Uno cards and he likes to arrange them on the floor and look at them. He used to be full on into this months back, and had abandoned em a while. He's back into them now, though for some reason. He wasn't too ridiculous with them, however, so it's not terribly concerning. He also dug out all his computer game CD's again, found a Nemo one, and as he loves to do, drills on down through the file system of the CD to the directory where the video clips are stored, and watches the video clips used in the game, watching them fast forward, then in reverse, watching Nemo swim backwards, and giggling like a drugged morphine addict. He didn't do it for too long though, and went to bed very easily tonight. He did ask for my cellphone once today, but didn't seem to be bothered when I told him "no." Hrmm.
Good news: Adam and his occupational therapist have been working hard on brushing his teeth, and by gum, that kid can nearly do it by himself now. With lots of redirection he'll put toothpaste on, and then slowly brush around his teeth. I prompt him to spit to keep him from being tempted to swallow the fluoride, and I had to prompt him to flip the brush up so he would brush his upper arch, but he's actually doing the motions and stuff...it's exciting. I clean up and make sure he gets all his teeth thoroughly covered though, as he's not gonna have that goofy dracula smile again that he had with baby teeth--at least not on my watch!
Another bit of "hrmm that's new" came today when the furnace repair guy was here and he was about to be taken to Grandma's by the wife. He goes into the garage and as usual says "take-a the van?" and instead of just going out there and blindly getting into the van as he always does (heading for the back seat--his favorite), he stopped and said "Ah Saen, ah Saen" in a fairly calm way. My wife got out there and realized furnace dude's van was behind our van. Adam had put together that taking the van was going to be a problem with where that other van was parked. He said then "Take-a the Outback?" and had the biggest grin on his face. Not sure why it was so amusing to him, but it was cool that he seemed to put together those concepts, and formulate a plan to get around the obstacle. With normal kids, we never think about this as a big deal, but with Adam, his progress is slowed to the point that you get to see every bit of development in slow motion. When it happens, it's definitely exciting.
Adam was also very sweet when I put him in bed tonight. He had a big smile on his face, happy that I agreed to put him into bed, after he requested that I specifically brush his teeth, and then when I gave him the usual good night hug, he looks me dead in the eye with a big smile and says "Thank you Uncle Tah." This isn't unprecedented, but you don't get it all the time, and it was just a really nice cap out to his day.
It seems that every day after a B12 shot is a really damned good day for him...I haven't seen a counter data point to that in recent memory.
Oh, in other news, speaking of shots, we're not vaccinating him against seasonal or H1N1 flus this year, following our gut, as well as the advice of his DAN! doctor. DAN practices are all pretty universally against these flu vaccines, since they all have thimerisol in the shot preparation, and the nasal preparations are live attenuated virus. Besides, I wouldn't be shocked that the long lingering awful chest congestion cough illness he and the wife had 3-4 weeks ago wasn't H1N1, or flu. With learning this year that Adam very very likely did have vaccine injury as part of his autistic progression, we are extremely cautious as his immune system is very clearly not as healthy as, say, our 3 year old who was breast fed for 2 years!
Also, my perfectly healthy friend who's an ER doc is also avoiding the H1N1 vaccine himself for now, indicating that for him, he really wants to see how many people stroll into his ER with Guillan Barre syndrome if any in reaction to the vaccine before he takes the plunge. I've heard several other anecdotes of vaccine researchers, and other physicians who are looking at this H1N1 thing with a lot of trepidation. There's no doubt it was a hurry up job, it's a relatively novel take on the seasonal flu vaccine, all the multidose preparations have the ethyl mercury and aluminum containing preservatives that we know autistic kids struggle with, and at the end of the day, h1n1 is often a pretty darned mild flu, although a lot more contagious than the regular flu. If any of us in the autism community trusted the CDC, it might be an easier decision. But, for us, we're all avoiding flu shots this year.
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