Posted by Caroline Collard on Nov.29, 2009

©iStockPhoto.com - Philippa Banks

My daughter, Emily, was ten when she started having problems. She would be unwell, but we were not really sure what was wrong with her. She would then pick up and go back to school. She went from two years of full attendance at school to fairly poor attendance. Over the next couple of years she moved up to high school and things got steadily worse until she was struggling to walk even a few minutes down the road. Fortunately our doctor was very supportive; however some of the school staff seemed to think (and possibly still do) that there was nothing wrong with her and she was putting it on and I was silly to believe her.

The doctor said that there was nothing he could do but gave some guidelines, the main one being to do as much as she could, no more and no less – not very easy! We tried various complementary therapies. We worked on geopathic stress, electromagnetic radiation, diet, homeopathy and so on. Getting advice on the geopathic stress and the electromagnetic radiation seemed to be the most useful.

Chronic fatigue very much tends to be a combination of issues: candida, hormones, diet and external factors. One therapist recommended a copper coil attached to a 9 volt battery with an amethyst crystal inside to protect against electromagnetic radiation. I didn’t really believe him but felt that we had nothing to lose and the improvement was amazing.

She has also had an autistic spectrum disorder diagnosis. Her twin brother is diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, but she is very different and girls on the autistic spectrum are notoriously hard to diagnose. She has always had some problems with dealing with other people and found it very hard to conform to the teenager stereotype, talking about boys, clothes, makeup etc, but at the same time felt left out and uncomfortable if she didn’t.

Interestingly, except when she was particularly bad, any amount of physical exercise wasn’t a problem to her, but going into school caused a big relapse. Obviously, the only solution was to take her out of school. We now have a good educational system set up. She has one to one tutor for a few hours a week, she attends small classes (two or three children) for a bit and does some distance learning courses. Her health is pretty good. She is rather prone to picking up colds and the like and still has many more sick days than my other children, but because her education system is flexible when she is better she can just carry on from where she stopped and is steadily working towards her necessary qualifications. She may take longer than other children of her age, but I feel that as long as she is going in the right direction and her health is improving it doesn’t really matter.

Emily is now 14 and she and I have an excellent relationship. We talk about everything and seem to have a much closer relationship than most mothers do with daughters of her age. In many ways she is very mature and can often come out with useful advice for me. She wants to be a psychologist working with children with special needs, something that I think will be ideal for her and her experience in recent years will help this substantially. I have learned to be assertive and to fight for my children’s rights, I am now much more confident when dealing with professionals of any sort and people will listen to me.

Her social life is increasing slowly, we have joined the local home education group, and as this happens her social skills improve as well.

Share

Posted under Alternative Treatments, Autism.