Friday 16 May 2014

Edward meets Omar - our dog!

To coin a phrase, yesterday was the best of days and the worst of days.

At 10.30, we all met Omar. Omar is a 2 year old golden lab and he is going to be our dog. My big boys were to cool for school about it and reacted in the normal 21st century way by posting it on snap-chat and face book, Edward clung to me like a bush baby and nearly broke my neck, and Richard, who had been against us getting a dog till we are rich enough to "live on a farm" (i.e. never!) just went all soppy over him. What a lovely dog, we all just fell in love with him. Ed eventually gathered enough courage for a stroke and with words of "Dog!Dog!Dog!' I think he was happy to see him.

So the day started out really well, after Omar left I took Ed up to school and all seemed well till he came home. I seem to remember describing him all hot and sweaty from all the screaming earlier in the history of this blog. Well, yesterday, you heard him before you saw him. He screamed and tantrumed till teatime, when he happily ate a chicken fajita. Was on again off again till we drove Richard over to Prestwood for a well deserved night out. I stopped in at my friend Bernie's for a quick cup of tea so Ed could see her chickens and maybe calm down a bit. That was great for me and him, but we got home all miserable again, and even hoovering up all the dog hairs only kept him happy for a limited time. He was happy on the drive to pick up Daddy, but back home again his screaming lasted till almost midnight. I can only think that he couldn't cope with the change to his normal day, getting to school at dinnertime, and then leaving after such a short day really upset his apple cart. I fell in bed at 1am thinking OMG!

This morning he was fine, tired but fine. And in the quite of the house going over the day in my head, I thought to myself, that's how he was almost everyday. Yesterday just reminded me of how bad it was. You know you do all these treatments and supplements, and you try this and that and because he isn't "normal" you can think that all you have done hasn't really made a difference. But yesterday really showed what a difference it has made for him and us. My family, bless them, are so supportive of my efforts, and recently the slow pace of progress has got me down. But yesterday in its awfulness showed how far we have come. I normally meet up with some friends on a Friday at Costa, but this Friday because of all the little ones they have, we meet at a coffee shop just opened in Kings church. One of the ladies hasn't come along for a while, she has celiac disease along with a few other allergies, her husband is allergic to dogs and they have passed these allergies along to their children. Her son has the same restricted sort of life that Ed has, along with being tired all the time, its difficult for him to go out because of all his allergies, her other children aren't so bad. Her story is a little like mine in as much as there is not really anything the medical profession can do or offer. But she managed to make this Friday, she came up to me and grabbed my arm and said, I've started to do NAET with him! She told me how his face had just lit up at the thought that someone could help him, and take away his pain without having to swallow lots of pills or stab him with needles. Her little girl was there with her arm full of pinpricks where they had tried and failed to take blood to test her for celiac. She kept coming up and saying "my arm hurts mummy." My brave friend has gone ahead with this whack-a-doodle sounding therapy out of desperation for something to help, my advice, and her watching hours on you tube of mothers saying how it has helped them. Her husband thinks she has lost it. Little does he know that when she has healed their children, herself and her mother (who has had an allergic reaction and rejected a hip replacement) he is next to be treated for dogs, so they to can finally have a dog in their family, like our Omar. XX

Tuesday 13 May 2014

inflamation

The other day I picked up my address book to call someone, as opposed to using my mobile with all its stored numbers, and out of my address book fell a small 3" square piece of paper. Its laughable now, but this was one of the first pieces of research that I did when I finally hit that wall of realising that if Ed was going to get better I was going to have to do it myself. On that piece of paper was written in red:

defeatautismnow.com
Dimethylglycine (DMG) (food supplement)
+B6 + Magnesium
Elderberry-tablets

In black I had also put B15 and TMG

I had sort of gone off tangent with my research for Ed, and although he has made progress, was stuck in what I was doing for him and had in the back of my mind visions of him going off as a young adult into full time care, I will be 50 this year and looking after a bouncy unpredictable autistic boy who is getting bigger and stronger everyday - well, its tough sometimes!

Anyhow, back to that bit of paper. I never really did anything with the DMG thing, so back to the Internet and once more I got sucked into the DMG v's TMG thing. You see, to heal yourself you need to look at your bodies functions, right at cellular level, and for a layman, its a minefield - no wonder so few parents attempt it. Lets face it, so few Doctors do! This small scrap of paper was the first thing I had noted down, I had no idea that I would fill up piles of A4 on this and that, and how that turns to that, but only if this is present .... Argggh!!! Mine field. The other week, I went to a treating autism coffee morning, and it was really depressing all the things that they had tried and still their kids were severely autistic. But you see, we have to play medical detectives, each child being different. And until the whole puzzle is solved and addressed, in order, change wont happen. That's why I eventually read the book I mention a little latter on. You see, I can't slip into being content where Ed is, he can't have a future where he ends up in a home, I need to build on what has helped and find solutions for things that are still an issue. I know its an American term, but I need to become - Crazy mom!

So anyway, in my quest, I came across some really funky stuff. I came across a therapy called environmental enrichment, which looks totally awesome. It takes about 10 minutes morning and night using household things, and you enrich their senses with smells, textures, tastes, temperature etc, and apparently this creates new neural pathways and helps with left - right brain processing. So, after the summer holidays, that's where we are going. Also, I came across a great company in the states that produces high quality supplements in patches, because getting Ed to actually swallow any pill is about where we are trying to get a man on mars. He is responding slowly with the B patches, the day after, he is noticeably more verbal, and the other night he sat in his room saying "oh no" in all the right places in the book "Going on a Bear Hunt."

So whats that all got to do with inflammation! Well, I finally picked up a book I've been putting off reading. Its a smallish book, but it has the same sort of paper inside as the bible if you know what I mean, nearly 500 pages of medical stuff in tiny print which made it look like a heavy read, and I just wasn't ready to hear what it had to say. The book is called "Healing the new childhood epidemics - Autism, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies"By Kenneth Bock MD. I reached out to it because I need help plain and simple, some of the medical and technical stuff, I just don't know where best to start. Our bodies are complex interactive systems, one thing affects the other and you have to treat the root cause for healing or your just tinkering with the symptoms. I am nearly halfway through and so excited that I just had to pen a few words.

Even to my untrained eye, the same things crop up again when looking into autism. Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis being just a few. At the very heart of all physical maladies, there seems to be one over riding issue and its inflammation, and it wasn't till reading this book that I came back to it, I had got so lost in everything.

You know I used to think that inflammation was just a bit of swelling, nothing to bad. But actually, to understand inflammation you need to picture your cells. So, imagine a circle within a circle. Your cell had two wall, one that keeps the inside in, i.e., all your mitochondrial which makes ATP (your energy) and one outside that keeps the outside out and has little receptors on it so that your hormones can tell that cell what to do next. Both this walls are made of bio-layers of lipid fats, and when healthy you have "cellular fluidity" i.e., things that need to get in do and things that need to get out can. Each cell has different receptors on it depending on the cell function, but they all have receptors for thyroid and Vit D. So just to be clear, those receptors will only recognise the element that they are specific to, like a jigsaw. However, when the cell becomes inflamed, the cell wall becomes hard and damaged, and the receptors stop working so well. If you have heard of insulin resistance, it means that the cell wall receptors for insulin are not working so well. So the conventional treatment is to give you more insulin, throwing more in the hope that some will stick. This happens to all our hormone receptors, our vitamin receptors, our mineral receptors etc. Inside on that second wall, same thing, only now the waste from all the ATP production can't get out, and a bit like a car in a garage with the door shut, things start getting toxic. As this happens, your whole bodies ability to detox gets compromised as your glutathione production slowly shuts down. This amazing compound is the foundation of health, and so you have a slow decline in your bodies function and basically everything goes tits up. Your particular lifestyle and genetics will be responsible for how it manifest. Eds is autism. To address any health problem you have to have a detox, but a detox at a cellular level which isn't easily achieved by over the counter things, and you have to remove toxic and inflammatory items from your life.

So, when you read that certain foods are inflammatory, a big red light should go on. Grains, dairy and vegetable fats are all inflammatory. Yes, all those veg oils and sunflower seed oils we swapped to instead of butter, lard, are actually really bad for you. And by butter and lard of course I mean fat from A2 outdoor pasture raised animals. So, this was a quick off the top of my head intro to my good fat bad fat post that I promise to fully research and back up and have ready for you by the end of next week. In the meantime, why not treat yourself and load up your veggies with melted butter and some nice sea salt and really taste the difference!

Now that I have renewed enthusiasm, and am learning more things I didn't previously know, I have renewed hope that I can make a real and lasting difference in my sons life, and via him, anyone else who is crazy or desperate enough to listen. XX