December 21, 2008

Well, it's been 20 days since Dominic's last bowel movement. How we ever got to this point with him, I'm not sure. It has always been typical for Dominic to go without a bowel movement for 5-7 days even as an infant, but as he's gotten older, the span has only grown wider and the worry more worrisome.

Dominic has high functioning autism. At the age of 4, Dominic was diagnosed with autism by the autism strategist from our local school.

Even as a most-loving and independent child with advanced coordination skills for his age, Dominic showed signs of delayed speech and poor communication skills with few words used on his own and frequent echolalia at the age of 2. We first introduced AEA because of his speech delay, however, after just a few months of speech therapy and minor progress, we decided to opt out of the AEA program and speech while our family underwent some major changes--moving to a new city and to a new house!

After moving to our new home, we decided to contact our local AEA once again to get Dominic's speech therapy started back up. It was then that we realized he needed more than what the speech therapist could give him and that is when we decided to integrate him into a pre-kindergarten classroom, mainly for speech modeling from his peers. Because we had expressed concern, an autism screening was done and that is when we were informed that Dominic had high-functioning autism.

Though we were prepared for the outcome, we knew that we had to do everything we could do to help our son thrive. We became heavily involved in biomedical therapies and researching every corner possible on the internet, getting our hands on any kind of reading material we could. You have to weed out the bad from the good, and that can be very difficult when you're a hopeful parent looking for the "magic cure".

Fortunately, we are blessed with a wonderful family in having their understanding and support as we try to "fight through the fog". As some of you may already know through the website www.hyperbaricsupport.com, Dr. Jason Rose, a chiropractor in Cedar Falls, IA, is Dominic's uncle and has dedicated much of his time to finding biomedical interventions to help Dominic and others like him who are affected by autism. Jason is also working towards certification as a DAN! doctor and has put us in contact with other great resources--a prayer answered, no doubt!

With such great success in such a small amount of time, hyperbaric oxygen therapy has proven to be a huge asset with our son. It is something we will continue to do with him whenever given the opportunity. Currently, Dominic also takes fish oil and a mutlivitamin/mineral supplement every day. This has also proven beneficial in his concentration and speech as his diet is extremely limited being the finicky eater that he is, eating only a handful of different foods--mostly unhealthy!

Because of his self-limited diet, this has led to extreme bowel habits, or lack thereof. Dominic was fully potty trained at the age of 2, but after moving to our new home, he regressed to the point where we finally had to give in to letting him poop in diapers versus his underwear. This seemed to work for him up until recently, when we realized he would do anything possible, contorting his body into any position possible, so that he would not poop. We've gone two weeks before without seeing any major bowel movement, but this time, something was different; he wouldn't even allow us to put a diaper on him because he absolutely refused to "go". Dominic recently missed an entire week of school because he refused to get off the couch due to the fact that he had the urge to go everytime he would stand up. Things were spiraling out of control.

After consulting with another parent of an autistic child who had been through a very similar situation, we opted to do enemas on Dominic. Unfortunately, after carefully administering 4 enemas over the duration of a week, supplying ample amounts of mineral oil and other gentle laxatives and drinking plenty of fluids, Dominic still has not had a bowel movement.

We are fearing the worst; impaction...