The other day I was in my oldest son’s room picking him out some clothes to wear to school and noticed on the wall in his room splatters of blood, following the trail there were also some splatters on the ceiling as well. This should have concerned me and in other houses may have even been the lead up to a horror scene, but not in our house you see I had been cleaning splatters of blood off of the walls, doors, floor and a long list of other miscellaneous surfaces all over the top floor of our house for about a week now. As I cleaned the blood off of the wall and ceiling I was once again brought back to the scene from the previous weekend, our three older kids had been nicely playing upstairs in G’s room, I had checked up on them a few times and could hear them up there laughing and chatting away. B comes and goes never really stopping for too long in any one place, he cuddles in our bed under the blankets and then bounces down the stairs, does a lap of the main floor and might go down stairs to the basement to sit in his bean bag chair for a few minutes before coming back upstairs and repeating the same pattern again. He may do a drive by hugging as I like to refer to it where he walks by me and hugs my legs briefly before continuing on his way, he rarely stops and when he does it is because he has been over stimmed and needs to just relax by hiding under a blanket in one of the beds upstairs or curled up on the living room floor under a blanket with just a little streak of his surfer dude hair sticking out. He had been upstairs curled under the blanket in G’s room with the other kids for a little while and then I heard him get up and start to once again bounce from room to room. Nothing unusual about any of that, and our upstairs is baby proofed or I thought it was anyways.
B has apparently decided to get a bit more adventurous than he normally is and managed to open the medicine cabinet over the sink, something i have never seen him do before, our medicine cabinet does not have any medicine in it ( that would be silly on our part) and the only dangerous thing in the cabinet is my husbands razor, he recently switched from the regular mens razors to an old style razor with a pretty silver handle,(Ben is like a crow anything shiny catches his eye) his razor was on the top shelf of the cabinet lets put this into perspective I am 5’2 and have a difficult time seeing the things on the top shelf of the cabinet, I have no idea how B managed to get the razor off of the shelf let alone in such a short period of time,( but then again he can clear my 5ft fence in less than a minute), there was no banging or clanging nothing more than the sounds of his bounce bounce bounce on the floor above my head, neither G nor lady Grace had said anything about him being into something he shouldn’t have been into like they normally do, because he was up bouncing again I headed upstairs a few minutes later to check on everyone, the minute I hit the landing I knew something had happened, not because of the normal blood curdling cry that most moms hear when a child has hurt themselves, no there was no cry, not even the slightest of whimpers, there was blood, a lot of blood and it was all over the place, I grabbed ben and tried to figure out where he was bleeding from, a tough job as though he had not made a sound he had gotten blood all over himself, I couldn’t even figure out what he had hurt himself on and didn’t find the razor behind the toilet until later when I was cleaning up, I narrowed it down to his one hand as he was flicking his hand back and forth and that appeared to be what was causing the blood to to be splattered everywhere. That was when he started to react not because of the pain, but because I had grabbed him and was trying to hold him still long enough to find the cut, my husband came up and had to literally restrain him in order for us to apply pressure to stop the bleeding our trying to restrain him caused more of a reaction from him then slicing his finger open with a razor blade had, it was deep it bled for a while (he is fine now and it has healed up nicely and the razor has been moved )
This is just one of the problems that I face with my lil man, he does not feel things the same way that you and I do, it makes it difficult for us to tell when he is hurt or something is wrong, and it can be very difficult to tell if he is sick or in his case has an ear infection the only signs he ever gives of a severe ear infection that would normally cripple us grown ups and other poor babes is the eventual smell that ends up coming from his ears indicating an infection. He doesn’t cry he doesn’t pull at his ears and he gets no fever. In fact he rarely ever gets a fever. And because he is non verbal he has no way of telling us how he feels.
His pain sensors don’t seem to register correctly, his body does not seem to feel hot and cold the way other people do, two winters ago he followed me outside as I went to get the stroller, (the first time I realized he could open the door by himself) I turned around and he was there standing in the snow naked from the waist down in -40 weather he was not shaking and he showed absolutely no signs of being cold I grabbed him and ran with him into the house, shaken by the fact that he had gotten out and that he had not even batted an eye at the extremely cold temperatures, that was the start of a continuous battle that entire winter of me fighting him to keep hats and mitts on, boots and coats. It didn’t matter how cold or miserable out it was he was trying to strip himself down. He still takes his boots off in the stroller in the winter though I have managed to get him to leave his hat on most of the time. He will trip and fall and nothing no reaction, he never went through that whole toddler stage where every little bump and bruise is the end of the world and needs to be kissed better and no matter how small needs a bandage, in fact he never even reacts to bumps or bruises or scrapes, I have stopped counting the number of times that a bruise appears out of no where.
Last year he put his hand onto a burner that I had just pulled a frying pan off off, I cried and shook , he blistered but did nothing. How do you tell when your child is hurt or not feeling well, they cry they show signs of being upset, and as they get older they tell you what is wrong. The first time I took him into the doctors because his ears smelt bad I left the office feeling like the worst mother on the planet how was it possible that I did not know that he had been in so much pain, how had I not realized and gotten him help sooner, how did I not know my own child had been in pain. And therein lies the problem I could not possibly have known, he never cried or grabbed his ears, he didn’t get a fever and he showed no outward signs of anything being wrong. This is one of the more challenging things about autism the inability to be able to tell when your child is hurting or in pain. Other people’s children cry when they cut themselves, even other autistic children react some like my oldest goes into a full out meltdown over a little scraped knee lying on the ground and screaming at the top of his lungs that he is dying with such sincerity and conviction in his voice that anyone within earshot may actually feel this is true and I have no doubt that one day someone will call 911 fully believing that he really and truly is seriously hurt or dying in fact I’m waiting for it. But then there are those select few that don’t feel the pain, or the heat or the cold, they show no outward signs of anything being wrong, and as a result I am left weeks later cleaning blood off of the ceiling and not even batting an eye at it.
That is me for today living life one puzzle piece at a time and freaking out any company that dares to visit with blood splatters on the walls.
J.
******Update I caught B in the act of climbing onto the toilet and then into the pedestal sink to reach my lip chap in the cabinet, in and out in about 45 seconds. *******
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