Chapelle - your daughter seems so much like K! I can't believe your descript
ions.
Very intelligent; taught herself to read at the age of 2 because I would trace my finger along the words in books as I read to her. She wasn't able to speak at this time because of the oral apraxia she developed with her 15 month MMR, but if I asked her to point to any word in a book, she could.
My NT son (4 years older) had to have "Hooked on Phonics" hammered into his head because he just couldn't figure out the reading thing.
Several of her teachers also commented that she appeared to have a photographic memory, and she has always excelled on tests that require memorization; not so much on the problem solving ones.
Before treatment (for bartonella, we never treated her Igenex IND lyme per say) she had profound spacial difficulties. She frankly preferred to be upside down, as opposed to right side up. She would hang upside down off of everything. As a child she would draw pictures of people with legs on the head and eyes and mouths in the wrong places. She required extensive OT to figure out how to draw the letters of the alphabet. While the concepts of addition, subtraction, and especially multiplication and division were easy for her (because she was able to memorize the multiplication tables), geometry was a nightmare.
It took forever for her to figure out how to peddle a tricycle because one foot would peddle forwards while the other peddled back. I pushed her bike with a stick until she was in grade 2. She did finally figure out the movements. It seems like she has to be physically taught most motor functions. How to move her mouth and tongue to make sounds (the PROMPT method used by our speech therapist), how to move her legs to peddle etc. Motor functions do not come naturally to this kid.
Her executive functioning was almost non-existant. Until grade 5 (about
1 year into bart treatment), I had to continuously remind her to do things. Brush her teeth, get dressed for school etc. Tooth brushing was hard because the mirror image is backwards and she could hardly find her mouth with the brush. I had to physically dress her on a daily basis because she would just stand there not knowing what to do.
She had no concept of time. She would go to the bathroom at school and forget to go back to class. Eventually they figured out to send someone with her.
Daily I would go to school and get the next day's lessons from her teacher, and then I would teach them to her that night. That way, if she was distracted from the lesson (she was hugely light and sound sensitive), she would at least have some grasp of what was going on.
I would also clean her desk because she was too distracted to do that. Papers where everywhere and frequently could not be found.
She had to eat lunch in the remedial classroom so the EA there could keep her on the task of eating. Without prompting she would forget to eat and bury herself in a book.
She had no friends in her peer group because of serious behaviour
al regression. Frankly, she acted more like she was in K than in grade 4.
The first 11 years of this poor child's life were brutal. With diagnoses of Asperger's, ADHD, motor delay, sensory processing disorder, and finally Tourette's which developed after her grade 4 MMR booster, I was running around after her like a chicken with it's head cut off. I certainly agree about
the "full time job" thing.
To think that all of this was the result of infections (most probably congenital). Treatment for bartonella resolved almost everything, treatment for babesia resolved the rest (which was mostly cognitive).
Executive/cognitive function is now NT. Her pediatric psychologist is amazed, and all the while our LLMD knew that bartonella had the capability of causing all of these problems.
K is essentially a new kid now. Getting B+ and A's in high school with little to no help from us. She grasps math concepts on her own and has made quite a few friends. She is cheerful and helpful, doing chores when she gets home from school - emptying the dishwasher, making salads, folding laundry, completing homework. All done by the time I get there.
I have remade our diet into organic Terry Wahls / PerfectHealthDiet; it has changed completely. For instance breakfast is a banana, an egg yolk, 1/2 beet, some sauerkraut and a smoothie made from organic protein powder (we use whey which you obviously can't), hemp seeds, chia seeds, wheat grass and hemp oil.
Pesticides destroy probiotic/gut function and thus immune response - likely the reason why chronic illness and autoimmune diseases are on the upswing.
people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/As for sauna, we use near-ir. The manufacturer warned me that K shouldn't use it until she reached puberty and had developed a proper sweating response to higher temperatures. She didn't until this past winter and she really enjoyed it. I can't say that I saw a huge difference in her overall health, but she was pretty much asymptomatic by that time.