When my son gets sick, he'll cry, sleep it off, wants to be held, and get right back to what he was doing within couple of days (which is rare that he does get sick).When my daughter gets sick, I worry about how much therapy time that could be lost due to "sick days." I worry about potential weight loss due to the fact she may not eat for days and can sometime lead to taking awhile to get her to eat normal again.
When I see my daughter develop symptoms of a simple cold, I worry it could lead to an ear infection. Because she is prone to ear infections. From the time she was 9 months old, she had a ear infection about every 3-4 weeks that lead to a PE Tube placement. During this time period, she would not eat well and lost some weight as well. Just when I thought it was over, she suddenly started to develop them again. Which at some point, we'll have to do something about.
The last two times she developed something "viral" that was going around, she ended up in the hospital because she got dehydrated. Since Addison is very oral sensory defensive and has her special needs, getting her to drink from the cup was nearly impossible. The first time she developed dehydration from the stomach virus, we literally camped out in the doctor's office, ER, and hospital for a week just to get her hydrated and drinking again. That round got so bad, that one of her labs came back critically low. That round was so bad that her veins could not hold the IV and had to stick her multiple times just to get the IV in. That round was so bad that when they had to get blood from her, it took even more attempts to stick her. We were finally able to go home a week later.
The last time she got sick was 3 weeks ago. We picked her up from therapy. Brought her home and she literally just sprawled out in the floor and would not move. I knew that was not normal for her. All I kept thinking was this is how she acted last year before she was hospitalized. We attempted to get her to drink something and could not get her to do so. This was alarming to us. We let her sleep it off and the next morning, she was very chipper. So, I gave her a cup a Boost. It came back up quicker than it went down. So, I called the doctor and got her in. They looked everywhere and saw she had puss in her left ear. I knew giving her antibiotics by mouth was going to be impossible since she was throwing up. So they gave her a shot in the office and prescribed us some more. Well, my job over that night was to make sure she drank something in hopes it would stay down. About 4 am the next morning, she dry heaved and vomited dark brown emesis. And off to the ER we went and got admitted again. This time we were only there for couple of days.
As you can see as a mom of a child with Autism gets sick, is very stressful. It's stressful because we know it leads to doctor visits or even a hospital visit. Just to give her medication is near impossible. It takes two of us to get it down and we hope it won't come back up. And this makes her oral sensory defensiveness even worse. It makes her fear the spoon and the toothbrush as well and takes awhile to get her to tolerate it again. If she had lost weight, we would be working very hard to get her to gain it back whether it's giving her Boost and foods we know she will eat.
This is just one of my challenges as a therapy mom to a child with Autism.
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