I really wanted to believe it was all hooey. I really wanted to stay in denial that when all of my children did the screaming reaction after shots, that it wasn’t the shots.
I really wondered when my cuddly second child just a day old in the hospital got her shots and couldn’t let me hold her and stopped eating for periods longer than five minutes, who couldn’t and wouldn’t be held within Two Hours after hospital shots. It was so severe that I checked all of the id bands to be sure that they matched, I asked the nurses if they had brought me the wrong child. One of the nurses stated that yes she was the correct child and that she hadn’t been able to settle after the shots. The nurse, very kindly, asked me if I was sure that I had used no medications or other substance that might have caused withdrawal. No I had not. She is 21 now and I still cannot touch her, or be touched by my wonderful daughter. She has issues with feeling and knowing love from this, but knowing she has tactile sensitivity does NOT effect how the emotion and the brain and the body respond by not being able to allow touch.
My son had his shots and did the reaction screaming and within two days stopped being verbal, at all. He was speaking early and in complete sentances very very early. He, a child who loved to place both of his hands on my cheeks, put his head on my nose or my forehead to gain my attention when he was speaking to me, twisted and turned and flipped himself over upside down in my arms to avoid looking, to avoid eye contact. I had to blow a small puff of air into his face as he twisted to gain any of his attention at all , and thank god I had taught him signs, as I refused to accept such lack of attention and lack of communication and forced him to make some gesture for what he wanted. Through hours of my own help, I had worked with small children with autism from a family close to ours growing up, I thought that some of the interventions were simply educating the young and good parenting. I deployed these, with all of my children, but particularly with my son and he made many gains forward on the autistic scale ratings. He now maintains a label of Asperger’s Syndrome, severe ADHD, sensory integration disorder and has scores of giftedness 2 standard deviations above normal but scores in working memory and processing on the MR level. He regressed so severely after shots that the physician now titers him instead. Thimerisol free shots, still cause a regression though not at as severe–to the outside view, a regression as normal shots. He does complain of not being able to think, and does more stim behaviors that he doesn’t want to do and works very hard to hide, as he is embarrassed by them. He has determined that much of the time that he does them, he finds that he cannot think nor organize and the actions help him to do so.
My eldest daughter, we thought had colic for months, over 6 months. I have since gone back and checked, she too did the screaming and had other larger reaction to her shots, but the ‘colic’ began the day after one of her rounds of shots. She has also had sensory integration issues, defiance, rigidity and other executive function issues.
Now that I’ve listed what looks like a rant AT the reader, I will tell you that my heart both leapt and fell at the news of the CDC whistleblower about changes and covering up of data that definitely show a correlation between vaccines and autism rates/symptoms. I kept this part of joy in my quiet heart and hoped that it might help other parents. It caused me, again, to flash back to the things I wrote above and to remember trying to stuff down intuition and viewing potentially improper cause effect relationships showing in my children. Then, this morning I ran across the CNN report in which the reporter mentions not hearing and pretty much calls all of the parents who KNOW, who have had to lie to themselves, who have twisted themselves into knots trying to swallow that vaccines really don’t cause nor effect Autism, trying to convince themselves that the reality that they see, does not exist–crazy antivaxxers.
I noticed also the youtube videos from parents of children with autism that had stories exactly like mine, some much more extreme than mine. I then found the following video:
I wonder how I, how other parents of autistic children, and perhaps mainstream America, hadn’t seen it blared across the nightly news. (Perhaps it was and I missed it, I haven’t had TV in years.)
There are persons who need to find a place to cast blame, because they cannot handle not knowing the why of their child having autism. There are those of us, who cannot get past the bashing of the self, endlessly wondering what they had done to cause this in their child. There are those of us too who live life and have absorbed the way things are and the way things go as simply normal, life on life’s terms. I believe that in the parent stories there too is a blend of these, however the thread remains the same, identical tales, identical recollections. Personally I had never heard of studies about mercury and thimerisol in shots, I just noted side effects, immediate results and changes in my children.
I think I should stop writing now. Though, I am having a thought what has changed over the years and with the shots schedules and ingredients? IF it is the shots, there was NOT an obvious, notice I say obvious jump in autism cases and diagnoses. I look at the people like me and two of my children that no matter how many shots are given NO titers, but massive side effects occur. Has anyone looked at the parents who appear to have giftedness, and quirks, perhaps not Aspergers but sharing characteristics that also share the lack of titers and how THEIR children react or respond to shots? What if each generation passes along a vulnerability to the shots, thus increasing the chance of more and more visible traits of austism and ADHD appearing symptoms?
Elisa's Spot 