Doctor's reaction to OAT results

So I spoke with our DAN! doc. She's overworked - the only DAN doc in the area - but God bless her (yes, God & I are on speaking terms again) she spent 40 minutes on the phone with me Wednesday afternoon.

At first, she wanted to agressively go (sorry for the split infinitive, Mom) after the yeast & bacteria with more prescription meds. I said "Um, no." This diet doesn't seem to be helping, and I don't want to keep trying the meds that didn't work. So she told me one of her favorite quotes from Sid Baker (queue the angelic choirs singing), one of the founding docs of the DAN movement: The Child is the Best Lab. So we looked at the one biomedical treatment that has worked, and that is the goat yogurt. The stinkin', blessed goat yogurt. It is the one thing that has made his poops more formed, so we are keeping that. I'm going to introduce slowly some benign foods back into his diet. Rice is first. We're going to keep the massive doses of probiotics and a natural antifungal going (Saccromyces Boulardi, for those of you in the know), and monitor him for a few weeks. In other words, completely natural interventions.

My sister, a brand-shiny-new DAN doc, will come for a visit in mid-November. At that point, she'll help us administer his first Methyl b-12 injection. This is a treatment that has had really remarkable results with some kiddos, so it is definately worth a try. My sister has already ordered some for herself (the shots are totally harmless) and she'll do them on herself for awhile. Then, if all goes as planned, she will give me the shot and Rob the shot too with T watching. It's a small, thin needle, and I'm told that it really does not hurt. Some parents give the shots to their child when sleeping, but Rob & I don't want to take the chance of him waking up and being scared.

So that's where we are. I can't give up on this yet.

This has been tough on us all - I feel like I have nothing left that is interesting about me, except that I have a son who is autistic. I have no interest in pursuing voice students, going to a new church, making new friends, all because it is all so much damn hard work, and I'm so weary of hard work that I just want to do withdraw. But I will do all these things eventually, because damnit, I am a positive person and I do think there is hope. I'm just tired. Really, really tired.

This has also been hard on Rob as well - watching me disintegrate into tears and frustration over all this, and nearly losing my mind. He would like to quit it all because he sees how hard it is on me AND he sees that it isn't having the results that we hoped for. I completely understand. He's sticking with me, but I see how hard it is for him to do so. I feel so very blessed to have him by my side through all this - I hear the statistics of percentages of marriages that end in divorce that have an autistic child (80% and I'm not kidding) - and I count myself lucky that we are not headed in that direction.