I reckon there's all types of grief in this world; grief at the end of a relationship, grief when someone dies, and just plain old grief at thinking life was one way, only to discover it wasn't.
I didn't really know what title to give to this post...but grief pretty much sums up my feelings about the situation we have found ourselves in. Anyone who knows us knows that we have been having 'issues' with our eldest boy for quite a while now. Initially we thought it was down to the bullying he suffered in his first few years at primary school and we hoped that moving him to a new school would see a fresh start for everyone. It was, for the most part, and for a while things looked awesome and the James we used to know started to come out of his shell again. We had a few teething problems at the new school, but felt this was to be expected. Got to talking to a parent in our youngest's class and we were talking about James and some of the stuff we've been dealing with when she asked if we'd had his hearing checked. Now it's always been obvious to us, or so I thought, that he can hear so I looked her a bit oddly and said "yes, no issues there", and then she mentioned something called Auditory Processing Disorder and I thought "what?" So she explained a bit about what it was and it was like a little light bulb going off in my head. I went home and did a Google (not always a wise thing to do) and realised that what little I could find described a lot of what we were seeing/experiencing. Now the ridiculous thing about APD, or maybe not, is that it can't be picked up on your bog standard hearing screening; all those look at is whether the child can hear or not, not whether they can actually process what they hear.
I did a ring round and got a couple of quotes and nearly keeled over at how much it was going to cost to get the tests done. However, we want them to be successful and if there are things that might stand in the way of that, IMO there's no point burying your head in the sand trying to pretend that everything is alright when it is more than obvious that it isn't. So about a month ago he finally got an appointment with an Audiologist; the initial consult was to get a bit of background and adminsiter the first part of the test. Because these tests are so labour intensive they are done in two parts; he did an awesome job in participating and to be honest we weren't expecting them to show anything wrong so when the final report came in the mail I was shocked by what it said. So many things finally made sense, but in one fell swoop the 'perfect' child we'd known for nearly 10 years had been replaced by a child who essentially can't hear. Not replaced in the truest sense, but everything we knew to be true was ripped out from under us. In the report there were some positives, but there were also some pretty horrible negatives. I won't bore everyone with the details, but essentially we now know WHY he gets annoyed by the slightest bit of noise when he's trying to work on something, why he (probably) doesn't like group sports/activities so much and would rather be alone, and possibly most importantly why trying to get him to talk to anyone can be like trying to get blood from a stone.
The good news is that there are things that we can do to improve his quality of life; some he might not mind doing, though one thing in particular that might be required that we know he's definitely not keen on doing. This disorder is 'silent', silent in that even when someone has it, it can rarely be diagnosed before age seven when trying to mitigate for the fact that they are having trouble processing sound gets harder and harder to hide. However, the symptoms also look like so many other disorders such as ADD/ADHD, Autism, and Dyslexia that it can be missed. Those disorders can, and do, sometimes run alongside APD, but it can also be a standalone condition.
So lots of crying has been done, but there's lots of anger there too. Anger that it's been missed for so long, anger that the MOE won't fund the necessary tools for kids with APD to reach their potential in the classroom and anger that the child I gave birth to has been lost; he hasn't really of course because he IS still that child I gave birth to, it's the THOUGHT of who he used to be, if that makes sense to anyone but me. Having said that, P!nk pretty much sums it up for me, cause through it all he's still perfect to us. Besides, who wants to be perfect anyway?
So here we are, flopping around a bit lost at the moment, but we'll get there. Since no one seems to know exactly what causes APD, we're probably going to have to get Alex looked at too at some stage, which is a daunting prospect I have to say. So there we have it...an explanation for some of the stuff we've been struggling with for so long, and hopefully we can all get the help we need. We know it's going to be a struggle, but now we know WHAT we're dealing with, it should hopefully be a bit easier.
