View Single Post
Old 03-04-2009, 05:24 PM   #93
Clodfobble
UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 20,012
So, it turns out "ripping the bandaid off" is, ah, kind of painful. Surprise, surprise. Wheat was just too hard--and we weren't seeing any noticeable improvements like we had with dairy, so we gave it back to him.

But the dairy improvements? Hoo boy.

After his very first foray into sentences with "This is a red spoon" (at 48 hours off dairy,) he has continued to spit out new sentence constructions every single day. In the last two weeks he's used words like now, these, it's, hey, and I for the first time in his life. Overall, we've just been having stellar days around here. He is calmer (not calm, but calmer) and happier than he's ever been. His therapist marveled at his sudden shift in language and has said that by the time we finally get an appointment with the pediatric neurologist (not until April), he may not even qualify for the PDD diagnosis anymore. He still has a lot of the symptoms, most noticeably the echolalia and strict adherence to routine, but the change from my perspective is night and day. He has suddenly started engaging in pretend-play with his toys, is voluntarily wearing long-sleeve shirts on a regular basis, and last night he sat in his chair in a noisy restaurant for upwards of an hour while we visited with a friend from out of town. (We had come in two cars because it hadn't even been a question in our minds that I would need to leave the restaurant with him at some point. The baby was fussier than he was. It was mind-blowing.)

And as a confirmation that it's not coincidental, he did have a tiny amount of dairy last Tuesday, in the form of a white-chocolate-chip cookie. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday he was terrible, the only bad days he's had since we cleared his system.

As I told lookout in a PM, I am officially a convert. Who knows how many unexplained diseases out there are really symptoms of food sensitivities? The results have been so dramatic, it's all I can do not to accost random people on the street and tell them about it. To be fair, I am still living in a certain state of denial: we were already feeding the kids separately because of Mr. Clod's work schedule, so he and I have not altered our diets at all, though we could probably stand to. But I'm hoping that will come naturally as the kids get older and I lose my motivation for dealing with multiple meals.

Last edited by Clodfobble; 03-04-2009 at 06:11 PM.
Clodfobble is offline   Reply With Quote