HOW MY SON’S SENSORY PROCESSING DISORDER CAUSED MY SEVERE HEALTH DECLINE

Having a son with a developmental delay was very hard on me.  He didn’t walk until he was 20 months old.

This was extremely hard for me because he didn’t walk until 3 weeks before his little brother was born, and I was having to carry him everywhere.

I suppose the bright side is that he didn’t weigh a whole lot, given that he was also a failure-to-thrive baby. 

His sensory processing disorder turned him into a barnacle.  I felt as if he were permanently physically attached to me.

It wasn’t so bad when he was younger, but after his brother was born, it was extremely difficult to deal with two small, crying children at the same time, who both wanted to be picked up and held at the same time.

And then when our nanny left to have her own baby when my older son had just turned 3, his sensory processing and anxiety went full tilt.

He was used to having someone always there immediately to meet his needs; now he had to share me with his baby brother.

And so my older son cried and cried and cried about every little thing.  The more he cried, the more it upset me because I realized pretty quickly that nothing I could do or say would make him not cry so much.

He would yell, I would yell, nobody was happy.  I knew this wasn’t any way to live, but I had no idea how to make him stop.

Over-The-Top Reactions

His over-the-top reactions to his sensory issues were really getting to me.

I quickly developed middle-of-the-night insomnia, where I would wake up wide-awake at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep for 2 or 3 hours.

This wasn’t helpful at all because the next day I was extremely tired and irritable from the lack of sleep, and the problem was compounding every night despite my taking a nap in the afternoon when the boys were taking their naps.

Constant Fatigue

I was constantly fatigued and tired before I had kids; it was so much worse now.  I was barely treading water just to get through the day.  It was all I could do to make myself go to the grocery store or get meals ready.  I could barely pull myself out of bed every morning.

The lack of sleep quickly drove my immune system into the ground.

Constant Sickness

Not only was my older son getting every cold there was at preschool (he’d go to school for a few days, catch a cold, then be out for a week with it; the cycle repeated continuously throughout his first year at preschool), but I was catching every cold, too, and I couldn’t shake them.

I would be sick for 2-3 weeks at a time with a cold, then, sure enough, my ears would get infected, so I’d go to the doctor and get some antibiotics.

Perimenopause and Other Female Problems

My menstrual cycles (lovely to have to discuss them here) immediately went from an always-consistent 28 days (that’s why I was able to get pregnant so quickly both times at such “advanced maternal ages”) to anywhere from 21 to 27 days.

I thought I was going through perimenopause, but I was highly suspicious given that my symptoms coincided exactly with the timing of the stress I was going through immediately after our nanny left.

I went to my gynecologist, and he gave me Ambien for the insomnia and Zoloft for the irritability.  I don’t like taking long-term pharmaceuticals, but I knew of no other option.  In any case, the Ambien did nothing for my insomnia, so I stopped taking it, and I was back to square one.

I also developed a uterine fibroid and ovarian cysts.  I had NEVER had these kinds of issues before.

Constant Candida

I was also constantly having Candida infections, to put it somewhat politely.

I know this is a gross subject, but Beth Lambert (co-founder of Epidemic Answers and author of “A Compromised Generation”) also said that many women have also told her that this was one of the most significant symptoms they had, where they knew something was wrong and they were getting no help from their doctors.

Mine were recurring every month, and none of the medicines the doctor gave me helped.  The gynecologist basically told me that I was an unclean person and that I shouldn’t wear tight clothes.

You’ll see later on how far-off-the-mark, condescending and ignorant this comment is.  You can also guess by now that she wasn’t my favorite person!

Shingles, Twice!

I came down with shingles.  I had no idea what this pinching, burning pain was.  I thought an insect had marched up my leg, taking bites as it went.

Shingles is supposed to be a disease of people older than 50 or 60, not someone my age.

Turns out that severe stress can make the latent virus from a previous chickenpox episode turn into shingles.  I got it not once, but twice.

Then the Worst Case of Poison Ivy, Ever!

I also had the worst case of poison ivy, ever.  I had been gardening in late winter, clearing out weeds and bushes from a part of the yard I wanted to turn into a plant bed.

It was a mild winter, so there wasn’t any snow on the ground and the temperature wasn’t too cold.  I had taken to gardening in late winter/early spring as I had become extremely intolerant of temperatures above 80 degrees or so.

And I used to live in New Orleans where it’s like that most of the year!

Apparently, I had been tearing out poison ivy vines left and right without knowing it; there were no leaves on them yet to let me know what it was.

It wasn’t until I went to my internist in early March after having suffered through whatever-it-was for at least a week that she figured out it was poison ivy.  “First case of the season”, she said.

She gave me a 6-day dose of steroids, but once I had used them all up, the rash came back with a vengeance.  It was all over me again.

You can guess again that I wasn’t too happy with what conventional medicine was offering me.  If you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that I was becoming increasingly disenfranchised with allopathic, Western, disease-management medicine and what it failed to offer my sons.

It seemed all conventional doctors wanted to do was give me pharmaceuticals or cut something out, and they didn’t understand that different systems in your body are connected.  The whole medical system really began to look out of whack to me.

Chronic Sinus Infections

I also developed a chronic sinus infection in my throat and ears.  It had been raining for 5 or 6 weeks straight, and I always had that frog-in-my-throat feeling where I was constantly having to clear my throat.

It turned out that I had a systemic Candida infection throughout my body (yuck!), which was not only the source of those lovely monthly infections but also of my sinus infection.  The constant warmth and high humidity from the rain made all that yeast inside of me really grow and gave me a mold allergy.  This was gross but fascinating all at the same time!