Hi all,
It has been a strange year. Our 10 year old son (oldest of 4 - aged 4, 5, 8 and 10) has struggled (with behavior) at school since he started. First we thought it was because he was bored as he has always been very good with math etc, but he refused to write stories claiming that he just didn't know how to even to the point of crying. He also had a very hard time with his younger brothers having friends over all the time and he never had any - and the few times he did he just couldn't understand that they didn't think it was great just sitting there watching him excel at computer gaming for several hours.
He always had a very difficult time with speaking when many people were listening and he would often 'shut down' when asked something that he was not 100% sure he knew the answer to, just stand/sit there and wait until it had passed.
The teachers asked if they could get the local school therapist involved and we agreed as it could never hurt we thought - we were not really convinced that there was something wrong with the boy though - he was just bored, shy and misunderstood. As it happened the system was slow and 2-3 years went by with constant reports from teachers about how he sometimes acted 'strange' and us talking to him trying to 'correct' these behaviors.
Eventually last year we were recommended a child psycologist by friends that we went to a couple of times and his diagnosis was that our son was a spoiled brat.
Well, in the meantime the school therapist was still working with our son and eventually this year recommended that we contacted the local hospital that had a department for child and youth psyciatry. They interviewed our son a few times and went to his school to observe him.
They immediately diagnosed him with AS!
Then when sitting there listening to their diagnosis and the reasons behind it - I realised that they just had described how I was... I just received my own AS diagnosis today and I am positive that my father also has AS and I suspect my older brother and one of my nieces also.
I am 39 today and all my life I thought that I was the normal one and everyone else were weird. How ironic life can be.
10 Nov 2010, 9:06 am
