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.

That assessment required three one-hour sessions, with LL attending the first one. I remember feeling exhausted, not so much from the effort of trying to recall events from previous years, but from the realisation that the problem we believed existed was truly there. I mean this from the view that our concerns were being justified and also from the realisation that there was far more to be recognised than I had believed when I started the assessment process. I recall the pressure on me to answer the questions “correctly” and the regular second-guessing I did over the three sessions. Finally, when we had completed our work, the clinical psychologist went through the criteria for autism and showed how LL had met eight of the twelve criteria. I left that session feeling completely shell-shocked. It was worse as I was driving home and it hit me that rather than the Asperger’s syndrome that I felt we might get, it was a full autism diagnosis. My view was clearer than ever and there was no doubt in my mind that it was the correct diagnosis. But it felt like our world had been turned upside-down at the time. The reality was that not much really had changed because my son was the same person as always and we were the same family.  We just didn’t feel that way at the time.

Today I found myself at the end of the interview, but without the side effects of the ones four years ago…life continues as usual.