Ben Age Two: Part Two

The following Monday Ben had tubes placed in his ears and we were so hopeful this surgery would cure our problems. We thought Ben was trying to say as many as a dozen words the first day, but the days following his attempts at communication declined. By Thursday, Ben had very poor eye contact, wasn't able to focus, and didn't respond to his name being called by me or my uncle. I remember that evening very clearly. My aunt had caught a baby lizard and I was trying to get Ben to look at the camera and say cheese but he was too absorbed with the reptile. I kept repeating, "Ben look at mommy! Ben say CHEESE!" but it was a wasted effort. He never looked up and 10 minutes later, when my aunt was setting the lizard free on a tree, I listened to her explaining to Ben, "The lizard is going bye bye now. He's going home." Ben started randomly saying, "Cheese" over and over again. My aunt, pointed to a bug and said, "Do you think he's going to eat the bug?" But Ben kept saying "cheese." My aunt asked, "Oh you think the lizard wants to eat cheese?" And I cringed. She was over-reaching and Ben had no idea what she was saying, and I knew he had finally just made the connection that I had been asking him to say the word "cheese."

He threw up his dinner that night - as usual - and just before bed my helpful and good intentioned hubby made him an instant bowl of microwave mac and cheese and got the whole bowl down. We put him to bed and I asked my dear hubby to watch this u-tube video about Autism. In this video, the interviewer is an uncle of an autistic boy and he asks his nephew (while the camera is rolling) to look at the camera, and says, "when I ask you how old are you, you respond, "I'm seven." " The interviewer looks at the camera and says, "My nephew has autism. How old are you?" he asks the boy, and the boy looks up at the camera and says, "Cheese." It struck a loud chord in my heart. I could see Ben in this child's shoes a few years down the road. Hubby, who up until this night still insisted that Ben was "fine", watched the video and made a connection I might have never seen.

He began a google search for "Yeast and Speech Delay" then "Speech Delay and Autism" then "Autism and Yeast." Immediately it became very clear that all of the antibiotics Ben had been on had continued to destroy the bacteria (good and bad) that keeps yeast under control. Together we read for hours about how diet can play a huge role in yeast, speech delay and Autism. We talked about how maybe the food we've been feeding him has been hurting his belly, possibly the source of his colic, maybe even contributing to his mental developmental delays. Immediately, Nick decided, "We're going to remove all wheat /gluten and dairy / casein from Ben's diet." "Okay," I agreed right away. I was scared but also relieved that finally we were going to do SOMETHING. Maybe this would affect his vomiting. "I want to go wake him up and shove my finger down his throat to get all that mac and cheese out of him," Nick said. "It's killing me to know this could be why he's been so sick. I'm not going to sleep tonight," he added. I told him that we can't dwell on the past, we can only work on now. From here on out. I went in the kitchen and put together my first gluten free (wheat free) and casein free (dairy free) morning snack, lunch and afternoon snack for Ben's school the next day. I wrote a long letter to the director of his school and his teacher explaining his new diet and how strict we were about making sure he didn't get a single cracker from a classmate.

The following day we made an appointment with our pediatrician Dr. B, who was out of town so we had to see a fill in.