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Let me tell you about our children We suspected for years that our children had autism, but the doctors told us, they only had autistic qualities to their behavior. They said that children who have autism don’t make eye contact, they can’t be touched and they have no language. Lucinda invented her own language before she started school. She had no interest in playing with other children, even preferring to stay home alone and listen to records when we went to the store. Robin earned good grades without much effort, she was very social and athletic. Robin became responsible at a very young age and helped out, especially with Doug and Wade. When Doug was three years old, a pediatrician said, "He is the most hyperactive child that age that I have ever seen". Doug wandered off as a toddler or locked himself in our car, where he sat for hours, thumbing through a Christmas catalog. He kicked and screamed when we tried to bring him in the house. Doug had very limited language at age seven. He was diagnosed as having petit mal seizures when he was eight years old. Wade had absolutely no expressive language. He banged his head and screamed for hours everyday. Twice we had the police at our door to see if he was being abused. We kept the chain guard at the top of our exterior doors fastened and all the windows locked in an effort to keep Wade in the house, but still it was not unusual for one of us to be out looking for a little, naked six year old on a bicycle (that's funnier now than it was then). Wade had his first grand mal seizure when he was five years old. At age eight, Wade started trying to use gestures to communicate, so I took sign language classes at our community college. As we started teaching him signs, he started to say words for the first time in his life. The more signs he learned, the more he talked. Wade was almost nine years old when we discovered that he was legally blind. At age 19 we learned that he was hearing impaired. It was very difficult to find the help we needed, but bit by bit, little by little, we learned what we needed to know, to successfully care for our children as well as ourselves. Our children have achieved things we never thought possible, and our (Court’s and mine) lives have been rich and full, because of our children, not in spite of them. In 1991 we took our children (Lucinda age 26, Doug age 22 and Wade age 19) to Oregon to the Center for the Study of Autism. There, they were diagnosed as having autism. Later Stanford University diagnosed them as autistic, saying that Lucinda has Asperger’s Syndrome (sometimes referred to as “high functioning autism”). A doctor at the University of Utah Medical Center later diagnosed Doug with Tourette’s Syndrome and prescribed medication that greatly improved the quality of life for our family. who have these special challenges.
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