THE Diagnosis

On September 14, 2008, I finally spoke with the right person at the school district. The district website didn't make it easy to figure out and, quite frankly, had I not been in education as a profession, I might not have even known that my district would assess Ross for free.

A very nice woman named Monica was going to go observe and assess Ross at his little preschool...get this...on October 24th! Wow. And this was just going to be the "screening"... not even the real assessment. After October 24th, they had 60 working days to do that.

So October 24th came and I got my first taste of an assessment. Five million questions. We have done several more assessments and they are all the same. Question after question after question. By the time she finished with me, Ross was napping so she ended up having to come back a week or so later to do her screening. That was the day Barack Obama was elected into office. I called her that afternoon to see how it went and that is when I heard the word "autism."

It went like this, "Well, he does have some signs."

"So when you say 'signs' what exactly do you mean by that?"

"He has signs of autism. We won't know until after the official assessments. That will probably happen after Christmas."

"Okay, I just want to get this taken care of before Kindergarten." YES...I actually said that. What?!?!?

Anyway, I didn't really pay attention to the election. I got off the phone and cried a little. Autism. Man. Still not sure, though. I'll go to the book store. I'll get that Jenny McCarthy book she talked about on Oprah. No problem. NO PROBLEM. Got it handled.

And, of course, I started reading. And that's when I started to learn what autism really was and that's when I started FREAKING OUT, because I knew Ross had it. He had it. So I e-mailed Ross's pediatrician and begged him to get me an appointment with SOMEONE who could officially diagnose Ross because I couldn't wait until after Christmas.

So we ended up in the fancy shmancy Developmental Doctor's office a couple of days later. He spoke with us and observed Ross play for, maybe, 20 minutes. He gave us the official diagnosis that I had already read about: PDD-NOS. Pervasive Development Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified. Whatever. It basically means Ross has some signs of autism, but not all.

This didn't speed anything up at all. Our first official IEP with the District to determine services wasn't until January 12th. An IEP is code for Individual Educational Plan OR let us tell you what your child needs plan.

The time between THE DIAGNOSIS and the IEP was excrutiatingly painful for me. I had no idea what was best for Ross. I felt completely helpless and pretty hopeless. None of the people we talked to would really say anything about what to expect, good or bad. The only thing that they knew for sure was that Ross would be socially inept and that there really wasn't a lot we could do about that.

I literally would wake up and for just a second I thought maybe I was dreaming it all. And then, of course, I'd realize that it was real and I would cry and cry and cry. I read it would take me two to three years to be okay with Ross's diagnosis. Really??? Ugh...I can't wait to write about how it only took me three months to be "okay" with it. :)