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A tiny bit of improvement
Lego Lover has been on a new medication for anxiety and depression recently, having started with a low dose and increasing to the full dose last Friday. After two weeks there had been a few positives and negatives, but none we could readily attribute to the medication. Actually, that’s not quite right because he’s had stomach aches and is sleeping earlier with the medication, both common side effects. On Saturday night he told me just as he was falling asleep that he felt like the full dose was making it a little bit better. The irony was that he’d had a massive upset of a “wrong” that had been done to him that day that lasted for hours. He isn’t able to verbalise “what” is better but I find it interesting that he perceives a difference. Is this a placebo effect? Maybe he thinks he’s supposed to feel better…or maybe it is starting to make a difference. The watchful wait continues.
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Blood work
During a pediatrician visit in August last year, I was given a pathology form to request two blood tests on the Lego lover. One was for chromosome karyotyping and the other was one for fragile X. These are standard tests now done when a child is diagnosed with autism in this state whereas it wasn’t when LL was diagnosed four years ago. It’s unlikely fragile X is anything of concern so it will rule it out. The chromosome thing might reveal something or it might not.
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Interview
The Lego Lover was involved in a cognitive, perceptual and motor assessment a few weeks ago as part of a research project at the University of Western Australia. Today I met with the researcher for a follow-up parental interview. Our discussion was quite interesting and required that I answer questions about LL now and during his fifth year along with a few questions on his earlier development. Most of the questions I was able to answer easily but I did find myself second-guessing myself for a few of them. It dredged up some memories of the initial autism assessment that we went through about four years ago.