Turtle said:
I was just recently labeled autism and the doctor that said that I said I am also not any of those things that was in the past that I was very bored and I don’t have that much brain damage either I have frontal lobe damage but not as much as everybody thought
Being misdiagnosed seems to be very frequent among people who have Autism, even those who have more severe Autism. I had literally every sign of Autism there was as a child (except I'm talkative, but actually being shy and nontalkative is not really an symptom, I've met plenty of Autistic people who are talkative too). Somehow when I was a child, I fell through the cracks of the educational system. I should have been in Special Ed, but remember, I was in elementary school in the early to mid 1980s and virtually NOTHING was known about Autism or ADHD back then. People didn't know anything about Autism then. My first, second, and third grade teachers just thought that I was deliberately and intentionally not following directions so I was being punished accordingly. If you got your name on the board it was a warning. Every check after your name you had to write the classroom rules 5 times. There were 5 classroom rules : Follow Directions was one, Raise Hand To Talk was another, and Keep Hands and Feet To Yourself, Treat Each Other With Respect, and some other rule I don't even remember (see? I was forced to write the rules again and again and I don't even remember the 5th rule!
). So basically if you had 2 check marks after your name, you had to write all the rules 10 times. With 5 rules, that is 50 lines! For a 7 year old, that's a lot to write! After 4 check marks, you usually ended up seeing the principal. The school decided after 2 check marks, they would call my mom and send me home from school. So I would get dragged by my teachers to the school office (and I usually was crying at this point) and the secretary would call my mom and my mom would pick me up, which meant often she had to drop everything of what she was doing. When I was 6 years old, my little brother was a 2 year old toddler, which meant that she had to take him along in the car to pick me up, so that complicates things. Mom wasn't happy at all by the time she saw me. I would not repeat the time I was 6 1/2 to 9 years old for anything in the world. In fact, I have hated my entire life except for when I was 2 1/2 (the earliest I can remember myself) to 5 years old. It was great when I was a toddler and preschooler. A little more on that later. I didn't get sent home in 4th grade or afterwards anymore, as we no longer had class rules. But I was bullied so much in 5th grade by these three boys that my mom took me out of public school after 5th grade and I went to Catholic school from 6th to 8th grade.
I kept missing doing homework assignments in the Catholic K-8 school. I have a bad attention span and couldn't remember to even write down my homework a lot. If you got 3 missing assignments in a semester, you got a 30 minute after school detention. I got 4 detentions in 6th grade, 7 detentions in 7th grade (4 out of the 7 detentions in just 2 months from September to November!!), and 8 detentions plus one in school suspension in 8th grade. Teachers rotated their duties on detention, but I got this first grade nun (sister) who was one of the first grade teachers numerous times for some reason....I must have spaced out my detentions somewhat. She was wondering why I was missing so many homework assignments. She was gentle, but she couldn't wrap her head around why I was missing so much homework. Her little first grade students didn't miss that much homework. I asked her how she knew that since they didn't get missing assignment slips (kiss under 4th grade weren't subject to missing assignments), and she said that she knew that, but also mentioned that "but, I call the parents of the child, if they miss too much homework". I thought "great". I knew all the first graders because we had them as "prayer partners" for in school mass. So we sat with them. The 8th graders got the 1st graders, the 7th graders got the 2nd graders, the 6th graders got the 3rd graders, etc. I knew 6 year old children who were scarcely larger than preschoolers and little girls in first grade who wore adorable babyish looking T strap shoes and Mary Janes, but then again a 6 year old is not that much more than a preschooler (this was in 1989, so children did dress somewhat differently than now, although we all wore uniforms except for kindergartners). I also had a friend in after school onsite extended daycare, which me and my brother went to, who was not even quite 5 when I met her. I was 13 then, my brother was 9, and she was 4 years 10 months old when I met her. Cute blond haired little girl. We played Atari computer games together, watched TV together, did our homework together, talked together, etc. She didn't wear a school uniform, being a kindergartner, so she often wore very cute babyish clothes, cute dresses, and T strap shoes or Mary Janes. This was in Fall 1989. The sad part was, she actually was better about completing her homework than I was and she was literally not much more than a toddler. I wonder to myself sometimes, 30 something years later, what her kindergarten teacher thought about me, since I was playing with a 5 year old at age 13, and missing more homework assignments than any of her kindergartners in her class, and interrupting her while she was teaching class to say I was ready to supervise the kindergartners at brunch. I'll never know now, because the kindergarten teacher passed away at age 85 a few months ago, so she took that secret of what she thought about me to her grave. I never asked her what she thought, but with my missing assignments and high number of detentions, I'd be surprised if the teachers didn't talk about me in the teachers lounge room every day, the most problemsome student. My emotional and social age is still around a 4 1/2 to 5 year old nonautistic child, although most Autistic adults average in the 7 to 11 year old range, even if they have a college degree. I have a bachelor degree in Geography from a state university. But academic ability and emotional / social age (and perhaps mental age) are two completely different things. I've felt like a child that was 5 years old going to university.
I had all sorts of problems in high school too. I was diagnosed as being ADHD in 9th grade. I was given Ritalin, which really did nothing much to help my concentration span. Around 11th grade, my high school psychologist came back from a conference she went to, she suspected that I might have Autism or Asperger Syndrome from what she learned in the conference. Never told my parents though. Quite a few of my high school teachers thought I was likely Autistic actually, but never really voiced their concern to my parents. I took Ritalin till the first semester in community college. My Finite Math teacher in community college thought I had Autism from the very start. The only math class I ever took in college. I went to community college for 2 1/2 years, then a local state university for one year, then a state university 2 hours away for 2 years and then graduated in 2000.
In 2002, some idiot doctor who had never seen me before thought I had bipolar disorder and I ended up taking Zyprexa for 17 years, all for nothing. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with Classic Autism in 2003 when I was 26 or 27. I only continued to take the Zyprexa (at a lower dosage) because it was an antiemetic and I have acid reflux and so it calmed my stomach, not because I was bipolar....They give Zyprexa (olanzapine) even to radiation treatment patients who have cancer because radiation and even drug therapy for cancer can cause nausea and vomiting. Slowly, I tapered down on Zyprexa and dropped it entirely 3 years ago. I no longer have shaking like I have Parkinson's Disease or something. My hands used to shake when I held onto something like even a container, or even lifting up a child. That stopped after I stopped taking Zyprexa. I am not bipolar and never was. I also never had Asperger Syndrome or higher functioning Autism because I had delayed milestones and if you had Asperger Syndrome, you didn't have developmental delays. I didn't walk till about 20-21 months old and didn't even talk till I was 3 1/2 years old. Also, most people who are on the higher end of the Autism Spectrum are not quite as emotionally and socially being as I am. Most normal nonautistic 5 year olds even can tell that I am developmentally disabled, though they are way more accepting of me and my lack of certain social skills than most adults or teens.
I was causing so many problems even in kindergarten that my parents and my kindergarten teacher (along with my school psychologist, adaptive PE teacher, speech therapist, principal, etc.) had several conferences about me. I was too young so I wasn't part of the conferences. The school administration suggested that I go to the district's emotionally disturbed children's class at another school. They even highly suggested me to repeat / redo kindergarten. I'm slightly surprised they didn't suggest for me to be thrown out of the public school district and ordered that I go back to nursery school / preschool until I could "behave" myself. My first grade teacher wrote in a report that I had an "extremely inappropriate and immature attention span, for a 6 year old". I got an EEG test done on me the time period that I was in kindergarten. It showed I did have a little brain damage. I also had a hemiparesis on one side of my body (weakness of one side).
Never had any problems in preschool. My teacher never complained about me ever. But then I also went to a parents participating nursery school at age 3 to 4, and all the children had their parents with them in class, including me with my mom. The only concern of my nursery school teacher was that I had a motor skills problem. Aside from that, nothing. Should have just stayed in preschool. I also was more happier then and I also didn't have people (especially from northern Oregon) bullying me on the internet like I was in my 30s and even early 40s.
A few months ago, I mentioned to my parents that I was surprised that my elementary school didn't suggest me to go back to private preschool / nursery school. My parents half jokingly said "If they had done that, your preschool teacher may have never promoted you upwards to another grade level and you still might be in preschool now!!" LOL
Oh well.... whatever works for this overgrown preschooler.... no matter. I write well, but I'm sure there are actual 5 year olds even now that are more mature than me. Maybe I should have had my growth stunted too. If I had growth attenuation, I probably would look like a 4 year old now. A little heartbreaking, but I don't think it's quite as sad as my current situation. I don't have hardly any adult rights, but then I don't really have any children's rights either. I've had friends who were small children whose moms said that they thought my life would have been easier had I stayed the size of a child.
Somehow the thought of me being the size of a 3 or 4 year old and looking like one, even as a proportionate pituitary dwarf, is too adorable. I'm sure that I would make all my preschool teachers drool seeing my adorable little outfits like long-alls and jon jons, and T strap Mary Jane buckle leather shoes, if I went to preschool now.
I didn't wear long-alls or jon jons as a child (though I did have overalls. I wore cute unicolor burnt orange saddle-like oxford leather shoes, but not T strap shoes or Mary Jane-like shoes, as a child. In the last two decades, I've learned about how little boys wear long-alls, jon jons, bubbles, button on pants (bobby suits) - and T strap shoes, which are more associated with little girls outside of the Deep South, because I have friends in places like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina that dress or have dressed their little boys in long-alls and T strap shoes. So adorable.
- longallsboy
