Cat has a diagnosis at last in The View from the Terrace

Yesterday we went to Cardiff for Cat’s final assessment for her diagnosis. We were expecting they would give her a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome as that is what her psychiatrist thought. I have suspected she had this for some time. We were all surprised when the final diagnosis was one of Pathalogical Demand Avoidance or Newsons Syndrome which is a fairly newly recognised type of autism. I did see a TV programme a while back about a little girl who was given this diagnosis and I did think it sounded a lot like Cat.

It seems that people with this type of autism do have empathy which is the thing that always puzzled me about Cat. She has empathy and people with Aspergers usually don’t. Certainly Hubby doesn’t which is one of the things that makes him so hard to live with.

Cat’s main problem is that things have to go her way. Most of her life she’s been seen as emotionally disturbed, or we have been blamed for letting her do as she liked without proper discipline, but we did try to discipline her, the problem was that she didn’t respond to discipline and if you put your foot down she would have a melt down. It could happen over something really silly, once when I wouldn’t let her pour the wine at Christmas dinner, she had a melt down and lay kicking under the sideboard for an hour. I was sure that’s not spoiled brat behaviour but something much more, but no one ever really listened.
The doctor yesterday explained that her brain overloads very easily, so that if something has stressed her or if someone gives her too many directions at once she can’t cope and goes into panic mode. She copes better if she is in control so she tries always to be in control and this can come over as being dominating or badly behaved, especially in a child.

She school refused on and off for years and was seen as a naughty child but we now know that the classroom was too stimulating for her. If the teacher asker a question and a child next to her spoke at the same time she would loose focus and phase out to avoid panic but was then punished for not concentrating so she refused to go at all.
She has told me that she can hear multiple converstions in public places. We went for a coffee in a cafe yesterday and she told me about the converstion at 4 nearby tables. She could hear them all. She said that as a child this would happen in supermarkets and it was too much for her expecially if I was also talking to her. She often had meltdowns in supermarkets but wasn’t able to tell us then why, she just went mute or had a tantrum in the car on the way home. She didn’t know that her experiences were any different from everyone else and she believed she was just bad.

We were continually told our bad parenting was causing it. I hate to admit this but once after being told by her psychiatrist how it was all my fault I walked away from all 3 children in Boots and just wandered around the town for ages. Chris was 13 then so I knew he would look after them and Hubby was on his way to meet us so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds but I understood how people could just walk away and disappear.

It sounds awful to say that my reaction to finally getting a diagnosis yesterday was one of pure joy. It was something she had been born with, it wasn’t my fault, well in a way it is our fault as she inherited our genes and it is strongly genetic, but it wasn’t me being a bad mother. I was always sure I wasn’t a bad mother but they kept saying it was us. They never seemed to consider that the boys are fine and have grown into decent hardworking men. We had the usual teenage problems of course but nothing serious.

I think we did a good job with our kids and maybe if Cat had had bad parents she wouldn’t even have survived. I wouldn’t change her for anything. She is a wonderful daughter, loving caring, talented, she is simply autistic. I just wish they had spotted that when she was a child so that she could have got more help in her education and our family hadn’t been so damaged by what the doctors said. I hope now we can all move on.