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Holy cow…

Holy cow…2011-01-10T18:02:56+00:00

The Forums Forums I Just Found Out! My Story Holy cow…

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    Anonymous
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    First time poster here. Talk about a convoluted trip getting here!

    Interesting thing is, my primary focus has been, for the past eleven years, on Autism, not ADD at all!

    Long story short:

    Eleven years ago my wife and I observed some behaviors in one of our sons that looked to me to be Autistic related. Turns out I was right. He has Asperger Syndrome. After eleven years of struggle and research it turns out I have AS as well. I also have another son diagnosed with PDD-NOS, which is probably also really AS, and a third son with very mild AS symptoms as well, but not diagnosed with AS or any ASD at all.

    What makes this kind of interesting is that my wife and I have put so much focus on our Autistic tendencies, any attention we probably should have been placing on ADD fell through the cracks all that time. What makes it more interesting, and us feel a little bit sheepish is that all three sons were diagnosed a long time ago with ADD/ADHD, but we didn’t pay that much attention to it because we thought we already understood ADD. What we DID know is that ADD and AS can be so similar in many ways that often AS is misdiagnosed as ADD. For years we were convinced that at least one of our sons had been misdiagnosed with ADD, and actually had AS.

    Well, I said I’d make a long story short, so here it is. We DO all have AS symptoms, and at least three of us really do have it. I’ve been diagnosed with PDD-NOS, but only because I’m now fifty years old and have learned to adapt and hide many AS symptoms (as the report states). In reality, I HAVE Asperger Syndrome. One son is diagnosed with AS, and another with PDD-NOS, that I am certain should be AS.

    Here’s the kicker. ALL FOUR OF US have been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Though I guess I kind of minimized the importance of the ADD in all of us for a long time (because research on AS indicated such strong influence on all of our lives and behaviors), I happened to have a bout of insomnia one night recently and caught our local PBS channel’s airing of “ADD and loving it!”

    The only reason I stopped on it is that I happen to be an avid Red Green fan, and love Patrick Mckenna. I was instantly mesmerized. Withing ten minutes of watching I had more definitive “AHA!” moments than in all the eleven years of researching Asperger Syndrome.

    Don’t get me wrong! I have not discounted AS in any of us at all. There is no question we all have AS, but now there is no question that ADD, which I always knew was there in my boys but only recently discovered I have too, has played a far stronger role in all of our behaviors and lives in general than I had previously realized.

    Learning about AS definitely provided a lot of eye opening moments, and helped us all understand ourselves and each other better than we had before, but there were still a lot of mysterious conflictions we could not explain. Until now, we simply chalked it up to the fact that Autism is a “spectrum” wherein people can be vastly different from one another.

    Put AS and ADD together though, and suddenly there were NO conflicts between what we understood and what we observed.

    Learning about AS was like a light at the end of the tunnel. Learning about ADD was like another light. Putting what we understood about BOTH, however, was like stepping OUT of the tunnel into broad daylight!

    Suddenly, EVERYTHING makes sense, right down to the little details.

    For those of you who aren’t on the Autistic spectrum, you may not fully understand what I mean, but for those of you who are, and also know about your ADD, I bet my bottom dollar you know EXACTLY what I mean.

    What relief!

    Except for one thing…

    Now begins the REAL battle. The real battle, the real war really, of learning what to do and where to go from here….

    But, at least I know where we are now. Before now, I didn’t really even know that.

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