Diagnosis Week

I gotta stop writing at midnight. I look at it and its like, "You know, I can tell that I wrote this when I was exhausted." But who has the time when you’re running around trying to get everyone in bed and just reaching for that few moments of silence when you can think.
I'm tired....Always. And more tired when I am sick, which is where, I am sorry to say, I have been for a week now. Sick with a cold that Booga gave me. We're supposed to get a snowstorm tomorrow and luckily we don't have school anyway, but I took Booga out of school today because neither one of us has had much sleep lately and I wanted him to get some sleep.

This is diagnosis week. The week that Booga was diagnosed fifteen years ago. I could tell you the day but it wouldn't mean anything to you. It means something to me. Everyone is excited and buying everyone else things for Valentines Day. But for my husband and me this week is the anniversary of getting the news that all our suspicions were correct.
I worked for almost three years trying to find out what was wrong with my son. I went from neurologist to neurologist, then from psychologist to psychologist. Back then, I had done research on Autism and PDD and Asperger's and they didn't want to diagnose him with anything really. I don't know if that is changed or not. I had to throw a book by Paul Zionts at them and demand they listen to me. Then we had to be sent to a mental hospital only to have them look at me and say, "At this point you could leave him here."

And that was like telling me my greatest fear for him.
"What? No. I'm not leaving my child here."
I’d seen my cousin go into an institution like this and never come back out so…BIG NO!!!

The day he was diagnosed my husband and I sat in the room, surrounded by psychologist and psychiatrist and when they told us, he began to cry- it poured out like water. He cried like someone had told him that Boog had died. And actually, in a way he had died to him. He wasn't going to be the football player he wanted. He wasn't going to work on cars. He wasn't going to have it easy. And yes, he was going to be a lot of work.
I had cried already, I'd cried and bawled and sobbed and wailed until I shook. I'd stood at our kitchen window with a sink full of dishes and Queen's Reich in my ears and the tears dripped into the water and I mourned my perfect baby with the Apgar of 10. And I'd already begun to bury that child.
My husband was just finding out he was dying.

It was a day my husband refers to as one where he got kicked in the chest. He sees it differently than I do because I had been dealing with it far longer than he. My husband spent an inordinate amount of time in denial.
That was okay. My dad was in there with him. They had jackets.
My dad, who was so intelligent and created different kinds of plastics and had patent's with his name on them, refused to believe that his grandson could be anything but perfect.

I'll never forget telling my family...The look on my mother's face was like someone had thrown a fish at her and hit her square in the forehead with the thing. She asked me if I believed in Miracles. I said I did. And then my sister-in-law asked me what we were going to do? And I said, "What's best for him."
And that's what we did.

We didn’t treat him any differently than our other children and our other children tell us they didn’t know any other way to treat Boog than like their brother.

We were told he would probably never talk (We were told that it was unlikely he would ever hold a conversation with us when he did speak) and that he would probably never be potty trained or learn to read or look at us or even know who we were....
Boog at twenty, sings all the time. Talks incessantly, although not always about something you are interested in or about something that makes sense to you. He is obsessed with Steven Spielberg. He has two books on him. He wants to go to Germany to look at the Cologne church because it has stained glass windows and a big statue of Christ. He remembers everything about movies and wants to be an actor. He wants to be Julia Child because he loves that movie. He wants to try every restaurant he sees. He types out long lists of casts of characters and knows all the movie company's. More than I care to know.
He walked his sister down the aisle when she got married and helped his father give her away. He danced with her at her reception.
There isn't a family member of ours that doesn't love him.

He is so much more than his diagnosis. And so much more than the doctors ever said he would be.
I'd like to think I had something to do with it but it's a lot of teachers and a good support coordinator and his family and now friends who have gotten him here. And God- God had a big hand in this. I prayed all the time on topics ranging from sleep issues to potty-training.

So here we are, fifteen years in he's still a big pain sometimes. But he's my big pain. And I wouldn't trade the big Boog for all the tea in China. He's awesome in his own right.