No Room at the Inn

Do you remember that a couple of entries ago, I mentioned that we were going to get Logan re-evaluated?  The purpose of this was that it had been so long since his last evaluation, and this person we took him to said that she might have some ideas that could help him.  Well, today I met with this doctor and got the results back of Logan's evaluation.

And it said that Logan was autistic.

Ha!  Got you.  Of course he's autistic!  I won't go into all the details of this test.  Suffice it to say that no new information came up. What was incredibly sad, and incredibly frustrating, is that this doctor, who had said she had some ideas that could help us, changed her mind and told us that we needed to go to some outfit two hours away from us.  That they could do a bang-up job with our son, and that she wanted to "wait" on having him come to see her.  Oh, and by the way?  This other place does not accept insurance.  No big deal.  It will run us in the thousands.  When I got home I checked out the place she was talking about.  The word "autism" did not appear anywhere on their website.  We had been kindly shown the door and asked not to come back for a very long time.

I only feel mildly disappointed.  You see, this is the story in the state of Texas.  We hang out at the bottom of the pool when it comes to services for the mentally ill and developmentally delayed.  More often than not, people with a child like ours are pointed in one direction, and then another, and then another.  No one has the time or know-how to deal with someone who falls in the severe range of the autistic spectrum. Parents of autistic children knock on doors and are told, "We can't help you here, but maybe this other place can."  And it becomes a journey of nightmarish proportions that lasts a lifetime.

Why does Logan need to go?  You ask.  He's doing fine. He goes to school.  It's not that he NEEDS to go or something bad will happen.  It's that children like Logan do need a lot of extra help.  They have such a complexity of communication and  behavioral issues that finding someone who specializes in that is like searching for the holy grail...it's elusive, and legend tells that such a things exists.  It will take you forever to search for it, and you may never find it.  However, if you do, you better hold onto it because it may be the only one!

Did anything positive come out of this scenario?  One thing that I can tell.  In all the testing she came up with one thing that sticks with me:  Logan is happy at home.  Logan is most secure at home.  Logan wants mommy to play more.  And perhaps this much is true...perhaps no one can help him more than his family.

And that, at least, is something we CAN do.