Saturday, October 20, 2012

How It Began

This is a summary of events that leads to the discovery of Asperger syndrome and amblyopia, so not all of the symptoms are related.

Our Son will be four in December 2012. For the past year or so he has been suffering from regular nose bleeds.

Although family and friends said that it's normal, being the paranoid parents we are we set up an appointment with an ENT specialist.

Even our pediatrician said that there is nothing an ENT specialist can do for nose bleeding problems.

The nose bleed was normal, caused by dryness of the nose and damaged capillary. However, the ENT noticed something different with his eyes. The eyes are not moving normally and he suggested that we visit an ophthalmologist (eye specialist) to have a checkup.

So we did.

Our son was diagnosed with amblyopia (lazy eye) and the vision in his right eye is terrible. He will be needing spectacles and eye patch therapy. We were thankful to learn that eye development stops at 8 and we can still try therapy to help his eye develop normally and achieve perfect vision.

We also feel appalled that there are actually mandatory eye checkups that are done in developed countries but not in Malaysia!

On Thursday we had the final eye checkup and the optometrist and eye doctor issued a prescription for spectacles.

They also provided a referral letter to see an orthoptists.

During checkup, the optometrist noticed that he kept repeating what she said so she also advises us to meet with a child psychiatrist as that's a symptom of Asperger syndrome.

Back home we did some research and everything that has ever happened makes sense now. We even did some online tests and quizzes and we are likely to be Aspies ourselves. Reading through a lot of materials from the Internet, we are convinced that our son is Aspie.

We are currently trying to get an appointment with the best doctor we can get, to get a real diagnosis and advice. However, from what we heard, waiting time is very long because there aren't many specialist here in Malaysia. We'll see who we can find.

This is our journey and it is going to be interesting. It's not going to be easy but we will go through this as a family.

- Abah

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