Living with Autism - Part Five

When he gets hurt or sick...

This past week was challenging.

A word of warning... this is going to be descriptive and possibly alarming to some.

A little bit of background:
Sammy was first diagnosed with Hypotonia (low muscle tone) when he was wee (like 14 months old).

This affected many of his motor skills (he was floppy, could not hold his head up) but it also affected his digestive tract. He lacked the musculature to work things out the way everyone else does (we tend to not pay much attention to how 'automatic' things seem for the rest of us; regularity, use of the toilet, digestion in general).

At the end of last week Sammy was constipated. It got so bad that five days had passed and he had not had a bowel movement. Monday night is when all hell broke loose.

Sam was in agonizing pain. He could not sleep. Jen and I opted for a shift system this particular night. She would be with him from midnight to 3 AM and I would be with him from 3 AM on.

I held him and tried my best to comfort him through the night. Sam was only able to sleep in chunks of time that spanned about 15-20 minutes.

Every time he had the urge to push out what was blocking him, he would clinch his bum because it hurt. Add to this his crossing of the legs and you're at the impossible - getting a bowel movement out of an area that is impassable.

In addition to low muscle tone, Sam has inherited his Momma's fair sensitive skin. This is only being mentioned because it complicated the situation more through the development of a nasty diaper rash from the leaking (of what is essentially bile).

Finally, Sam was able to push some of his impacted rock hard poop out.

We were agonizing with Sam (at times it seemed that we were worse off than he was).

After a few days he was back to normal and we have returned to a hyper-vigilant mode of keeping track of things.

It always seems to much worse to watch your child suffer. Its more challenging when there is no language to communicate with your child. We end up having to take our best 'guess'. Sometimes we choose correctly, other times we're wrong.